Working is hard and distracts from having fun.

Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going.

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations. But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war.

My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.

Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make.

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.

The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.