It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow.

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.

It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself.

I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command.

It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.

There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.

I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.

I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.

Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.

Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge.

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow.

The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.

Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.

I'm dense when it comes to discouragement.

I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.

That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

I'm always trolling for trivia.

During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions.

I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.

If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.

The generic Canadian style of illustration is different from the generic American style.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

I want to be the first lady to land a quadruple jump in competition. As I grow older, I know that my skating style will develop and mature.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.

The Stones are a different kind of group. I realized that when I joined them. It's not really so much their musical ability, it's just they have a certain kind of style and attitude which is unique.

His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

Peter, of the three of us, was our prince. He seemed so timeless. He had such elan and style.

The difference between style and fashion is quality.

Style? I have no style.

Style is the dress of thought; a modest dress, Neat, but not gaudy, will true critics please.

I can play punk rock, and I love playing punk rock, but I was into every other style of music before I played punk rock.

Because there is actually something very interesting in Goodfellas, how the style of the film changes as time goes by and based on the mental state of the protagonist.

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always twenty times better.

Every top player has his own style, just as every painter has his own personal signature.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

Instead of the international police action we had hoped for during the war in Kosovo, there are wars again - conducted with state-of-the-art technology, but still in the old style.