Sure, at heart I wanted to be a Dickens, but I hated being great on command.

The best kind of praise is intelligent praise.

For heaven's sake, Wade, you sound as if it involved capes and daggers and poisons. Take out one of your dreams and dust it off and send it to Miss Harper to work on. Goodness knows you have enough of them lurking in that aweful brain of yours.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I'm a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they're mine, so who cares.

I've gone out on limbs, flung far, and Forrest-Gumped my way into the center of the action.