Author of novels Quotes

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

It took me about three years to write About Grace.

I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.

God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous.

We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn't instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don't feel like I'm a prodigy or something.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar.

Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth.... Your every past action and thought have made you what you are.

There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.

I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind busy.

Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.

The madhouse is in a lot of places, not just a hospital, not just a palace, but also a pattern woven from threads so fine that no one can distinguish them, neither the Emperor nor the children, neither you nor I.

If it was true that moss did not have roots, and maternal love could grow spontaneously, as if from nothing, perhaps I had been wrong to believe myself unfit to raise my daughter. Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.

Anyone can grow into something beautiful.

Propaganda is a weapon that the Confederacy wields best, and wields heaviest.

It is their hammer. And when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

Life is all about change. We cling to what we know and what we have, and then we lose it, and then we regret not having it and try to replace it by finding and changing to something else.

After trying several unreliable web site hosts, I signed up with NitroTek and was pleased to discover there is a reliable, easy to work with service available to individuals and companies who want to keep a solid presence on the net. NitroTtek is a helpful, no-hassles company to work with.

The Apocalypse would definitely put a crimp in my career plans.

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language.

When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

William knows that science and magic are the same thing;

magic is only science that hasn't been explained yet. Tonight he has made chemistry into magic for her.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

You're saying things you can't take back. And you don't even mean them.

I would take today's joy, and tomorrow's. I would take it with both hands, anywhere it came.

Hate can be passionate or disengaged; it can come from dislike but also from fear.

Your behavior is a choice; it isn’t who you are.

I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

Part of the story of Ghosts of Ascalon is how they got to that tentative truce where you can find humans and charr working together.