Quotes on Way

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

There is no substitute for practical experience, and if you want to write about people you ought to put down that comic book and go out and meet some of them rather than studying the way that Stan Lee or Chris Claremont depict people.

You think you would react one way when a situation develops and, and when the sharp shells are flying, you don't quite stand up like you think you might.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

The ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language.

You need to keep something for yourself. As a writer, I feel that even more strongly. I feel like I need to be able to freely observe the world. That's the way I like to move through the world; I don't need to be the focus of attention. If I am, it impairs my ability to write and to do what I do.

Career-wise, there are so many things where you don't get what you think you want. I've had to make space for, 'Do I let that debilitate me and make me feel bad about myself? And make me feel like I need to change myself in some way?' Because I think changing myself is very different from growing and learning.

When you're in the spotlight, people want to dissect you and then put you back together the way they want you.

I love working. I love it! It makes me feel awake and alive and appreciative, as does my family, but in a different way. If I was told I couldn't do it, I think I would wither and die.

Everyone is taught the essentials of writing for at least 13 years, maybe more if they go to college. Nobody is taught music or tap dancing that way.

If you look at iPod, iPod wasn't viewed as a success, but today it's viewed as an overnight success. The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there's no physical keyboard. Obviously nobody would want it.

Boxing is the ultimate challenge. There's nothing that can compare to testing yourself the way you do every time you step in the ring. On the downside, you meet a lot of really bad people in boxing, at all stages of your career.

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

That's just always the way my mind has worked, is taking something that seems impossible, or too big, and then breaking it down into these pieces so that I know how to get there.

A revolution resembles the death of a fading star, an exhilarating Technicolor explosion that gives way not to an ordered new galaxy but to a nebula, a formless cloud of shifting energy.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

There was a point in my 40s when I went into the bathroom with a bottle of wine, locked the door, and said, 'I'm not coming out until I can totally accept the way that I look right now.'

Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.

I'm all for any place, any way, any media that can help people connect with somebody and not be lonely.

You can go from object to object, from plant to plant, from animal to animal and regard them as symbols for the spiritual. In this way, you make your imaginative capacities fluid and release them from the sharp contours of sense perception.

I never got the chance to meet Linda Brown; there were several times we were supposed to meet or be on the same stage together, but life gets in the way, and it never happened.