I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.

That's such a thrill - a story I wrote at the beginning of my career, and it's still packin' the house.

I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage.

I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

I think the Internet, particularly the availability of information, is great. I do a lot of correspondence on-line and have a chat line to talk to my fans as well.

I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale.

Make no judgements where you have no compassion.

I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media... it still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start.

Because we build the worlds we wouldn't mind living in. They contain scary things, problems, but also a sense of rightness that makes them alive and makes us want to live there.

Mostly I'm telling people that they don't have to be victims.

I'm 78, I'm on my pension in Ireland, and all that good stuff.

At age 77, I need the help of someone with more energy than I can now summon to finish a book.

But Ship Who Sang remains my favorite story. I really rocked folks with that and still cannot read it aloud myself without weeping at the end.

People have freaked out when I tell them that my dragons are scientifically based... what else can you call a genetically engineered life form?

I also don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured - since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing - that religion was one problem Pern didn't need.

That's what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.

Writing has been so much a part of my life that I'm really quite annoyed that I can't do as much as I used to.

But I will say that living in Ireland has changed the cadence and fullness of speech, since the Irish love words and use as many of them in a sentence as possible.

I have written my own screen version of Pern, but had no buyers yet.

I have a shelf of comfort books, which I read when the world closes in on me or something untoward happens.

What I used to do between writing fits was feed my kids, ride my horse and go shopping for cat and dog food.

I have my good days and my bad days, but I don't have as much energy as I used to back when I was young and foolish and didn't count the cost - and it takes a lot - to write.

The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

I don't often reread my own books, unless I am going into another in the series and need to refresh my mood when originating the concept.

I do outlines when I'm writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom.

I didn't raise Todd to be a writer, but he happened to be one anyway.

I'm very fond of the Talent series, and also the Crystal Singer trio.

By Rice's own standards, the war was well underway by the time he took office. He was a war president the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one?

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

I have done things politically, and I've been running a business at the same time, but I sort of joke that to some extent I do more than most legislators have done in their whole careers, and I've been doing it as a part-time job.

I hate wasting people's time.

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

The work that we do during the winter is very important; we have a new bike and it's important to develop it during this time, and we start with this test.

Fortunately, I happened to go east at a time when live television was centered in New York.

I want to spend more time with those kids. I want to dedicate my time to train those kids and teach them what it takes, what they need to do to get to this level.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

Sitting at home the way I do, I'd just love the hear from people. It'd be a great help in passing the time.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

Compared to today's salaries, our cut was minuscule but it was very good for the time.

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel.

When I did the record, I was coming off a time when my contract had been sold and the music industry had changed a lot. I didn't understand how to make records for big labels. I was waiting for a new kind of record label to emerge.

Hell, if I'd jumped on all the dames I'm supposed to have jumped on, I'd have had no time to go fishing.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.