I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one person in the world just like him. We humans are simply incapable of imagining non-human actions or behavior. It's the writer's fault if we don't believe in his characters as human beings.

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.