There are thousands of proteins in the cells, some of them very large chains of molecules. And the cell doesn't function if one of those chains of molecules isn't there, and you start looking at the complexity of life and the mystery of life, and then start thinking about things like the twenty universal constants, that if any one of them from Plank's minimum to the mass of a proton, if one of them is the tiniest bit off, there would be no life or possibility of it in the universe.
While I like people, I do also like being alone in a room and seeing what you can do with a particular theme or subject.
I enjoy the hell out of writing but don't like what follows: promotion and publicity, which I always strive to keep to a minimum, sometimes to my publisher's dismay.
Every writer has his own voice. Other than that I'm always trying to do change-ups and publishers haven't always been happy about that.
I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing.
Being paid well for something you love to do - it's a grace.
I fall down on the side of free will, simply because if you look at where I came from, and what I was able to do in my life, what was able to happen.
I imagined a life that turned out to be pretty much exactly like the one I've had. That fascinates me endlessly. I wake up many mornings, and it almost wouldn't surprise me if I woke up from it and it was all a dream.
You can't always win arguments as a writer, but you have to just go ahead and say, well, I'm doing it that way anyway.
I can remember the times when I started including humor in novels that were suspenseful. I was told you can't do that because you can't keep the audience in suspense if they're laughing. My attitude was, if the character has a sense of humor, then that makes the character more real because that's how we deal with the vicissitudes of life, we deal with it through humor.
I've had good publishers and bad publishers, and you've got to learn when the advice is sensible and when it's not.
Books showed me that there were other ways to live a life.
I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can't make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.
