Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time -- life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

Fiction---good fiction, anyway---is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely good enough' to a vision of what is truly great......and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves.THAT is why you write fiction.

Console yourself not with the lie that your foe is weak, or stupid, or evil. Sometimes the enemy is worthy. Sometimes his cause is just. Sometimes both sides are right in their own ways-and in the hour that just causes collide, good men will rise up and leap into the fray, and the clash of their meeting will shake the heavens. And their blood will flow like rivers.

If you have dreams you want to pursue, the time to pursue them is now. There is no perfect time, and there is no better time. There is only the time you lose while you're making excuses.

I have never yet figured out what to do about good advice that you get, and that you know right away would help you, but that you cannot follow.

Adventures are only interesting once you've lived to see the end of them. Before that, they are nothing but fear, and being too cold or too hot or too wet or too hungry, and getting hurt.

Race doesn't exist.Skin color exists. Hair and eye color are real. Body type varies from individual to individual, as does tooth shape and color, the form of fingernails, and the amount and texture of body hair. But 'race' is a phantom conjured up by people no different from each other than purebred Cocker spaniels are. Race is a lie, and the people who conjure by it, no matter their color or their politics, are liars.

The story I'm writing finds its own voice while I'm writing it.

I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.