It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

Dust jackets are always something of an enigma to me.

Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.