Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.
Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.
You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
Lower interest rates are usually considered good for stocks because they lower the cost of borrowing and make bonds a less attractive alternative investment.
No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
I think that's a hallmark of a really good story that it has readers that it speaks to more than others.
It seems like, to me, somewhere between 30 and 35 is a really, really good time to turn your eggs into babies.
When we clear the physical clutter from our lives, we literally make way for inspiration and 'good, orderly direction' to enter.
I think that good storytelling of any kind does promote a humility in that it encourages you to see the world the way that other people see it.
Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for it's own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one's thoughts.
At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.
Why do people do things that they fear? It may be that the fear contains information. Something can be interesting if you get to the other side of that fear.
Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.
If there is any form of contagion that is adaptive, it is the immediate response to the fear of others. If others are fearful, there may be good reason for you to be fearful too.
The Feminist Me says that a woman's right to her own body should be inviolate at all times, free from fear of peeping paps.
Many Americans genuinely fear that God is preparing to remove his hand of protection and blessing from our country, or perhaps already has.
Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
We do not just fear our predators, we are transfixed by them. We are prone to weave stories and fables and chat endlessly about them.
I didn't invent the fear of sharks; it's as old as mankind, and that - to take that responsibility would mean that Mario Puzo should take the blame for the Mafia.
Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into carefully chosen ranks.
While I was busy hating Vegas, and hiding from Vegas, a funny thing happened. I grew to love Vegas.
