People keep asking me, "Where do you get the ideas for your books?"From the worst moments in my life.I call that "literature through disaster." I got the whole Tales from Earth's End Saga that way, as well as Numenon. Don't be afraid of the hard times.

Your main character not only needs a goal, she need an inner desire.

I was just getting to the good bit when I heard the sound of his footsteps approaching and wasn't sure whether I would rather be alone with him or alone to finish my book. Men come and go. A good book lasts forever.

I began to write and came to see that writing has the same laws as nature. The simplest way to say something is always the best. Is that simple enough?

Gavin said that writing novels with a PC was supposed to be easier than writing with a typewriter and bond paper, or with a pen and foolscap, or with a chisel and a granite obelisk imported from Greece. I shook my head with pity as he related this canard to me.

the most important in writing it should be from you heart

Women who read are dangerous. Women who write are to be avoided.

You know the fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person – a real person you know, or an imagined person – and write to that one.

Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own.