Look at it this way: We're two people who happen to have a lot in common, a connection most people would kill for, we trust each other, and we have the kind of sex that people base pornos on. The fact that we're both men really doesn't make a differe...
Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbl...
You don't become a runner by winning a morning workout. The only true way is to marshal the ferocity of your ambition over the course of many day, weeks, months, and (if you could finally come to accept it) years. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.
Many who read their Bibles make the great mistake of confining all their reading to certain portions of the Bible which they enjoy. In this way they get no knowledge of the Bible as a whole. They miss altogether many of the most important phases of B...
You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but...
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play ...
I am a sick man - oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months ago, it would have been different. It is too late, now.
In 1938, when I had decided that the only way to see the country was in a trailer, and I built the trailer which I still have and lived in it for eighteen months, and learned America from San Diego to the Canadian border, from Miami to New Jersey, an...
Sometimes walking away is the only way to win. – Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who have proven that they are committed to misunderstanding you. In other words, don’t define your intelligence by the number of arguments...
You could say that life just happens and it's the way it goes, you either accept it or you fight it... Or You can be one of the few that rises above this perception and fights in all their glory to create the life they want, regardless of the struggl...
She was tough in the best sense of the word. She'd taken blows, the disappointments, and had worked her way through them. Some people, he knew, would have buckled under, found a clutch, or given up. But she had carved a place for herself and made it ...
Selfish in his posture; material at his grasp, smirk upon his face; but this success will not last. For you see, son, his purpose; lost along the way, He started only living; for the dollar that he made. Never make that error; for a dime to loose sig...
I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript...
You start thinking about a character in a new book, of course you're going to think pretty soon, 'Well, what's their secret? What is their problem?' Maybe, 'What is their secret?' is another way of saying, 'What is their problem?' There's got to be s...
When I was younger I used to think that band-aids did all the work. I mean after all, it binds your wound together and makes everything better back to the way it was. But then I became an adult and started to fall in love,fvi and I realize that band-...
We walked up and down in the snow, I on skis and she on foot ( said and proved that could get along just as fast that way), and gradually the idea took shape that this was no chipping or cracking of the nucleus but rather a process to be explained by...
When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the ...
So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier te...
I do feel Scottish in some way. Maybe it's to do with visiting my grandparents here every summer as a child, but I am aware of my Scottish ancestry. It's there all right, but it would be pushing it to label me a Scottish painter. Or, indeed, an anywh...
We've come a long way since 'Beowulf.' In the twentieth century, a strain in children's and YA literature offered the humorously conceived cozy dragon, a sometimes bumbling friend and guardian figure. Starting as early as Kenneth Grahame's 'The Reluc...
Between 2001 and 2011, Brazil lifted 20 million people out of poverty and into its growing middle class, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century Botswana's gross domestic product per capita grew faster than that of any other country on the p...
