“Great relationships create great characters. Make them feel real. Alive. Tangible and unforgettable. Bad relationships kill them. Bury them. Make you wish they hadn't wasted your precious time.”

“Of course I believe in magic. I believe in storytelling.”

“I don't know who a character is till I look into their eyes.”

“They say a picture's worth a thousand words, but with me it always ends up being well over a hundred thousand.”

“Life is about connection, not perfection.”

“To reach for yourself is to survive, to reach for others is to provide.”

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

“Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.”

“When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.”

“Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone...”

“Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," a...”

“There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean hell, I know that.”

“The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you cant, youre dead”

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebooka fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

“Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. Its the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.”