Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.

I love to fool my readers, but in a good way. If you've read any of my work, there's a good chance that at some point I surprised you.

Desire is like fog on a bathroom mirror -- its presence incites you to wipe the mirror, and see yourself clearly again.

True balm of fantasy takes away the painful irritation of life and simply heals, allowing one to begin anew. And that is what fantasy can do for us.

Yawns are not the only infectious things out there besides germs.

Giggles can spread from person to person.

So can blushing.

But maybe the most powerful infectious thing is the act of speaking the truth.

A choir is made up of many voices, including yours and mine. If .one by one all go silent then all that will be left are the soloists. Don't let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.

Stick around long enough to be someone's friend. Because true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.

In Lords of Rainbow I start out by taking away color from the world, and in the process show color's vital place in our lives. At least I hope that by the end of the book it's a portion of what the reader comes away with -- a sense of how much color perception enriches our lives and how its lack can make our sensory experience incomplete.

Here is where I like to burst in as a writer, to take one strong sensory detail or image and instead of enhancing it or directing attention to it by shouting about it, I simply take it away.

I sat down and wrote a short story in two weeks and submitted it to Marion Zimmer Bradley. And Marion bought Wound On The Moon .My first sale and my first pro sale rolled into one.

Seems to me that there is no better way to experience the depth of loss than after the fact. No more powerful instrument of imbuing value in an object than parting with it.

Instructions are never included. They vary with the strength of your ability to see, the measure of your selective blindness, the limits of your mercy, and the intensity of your desire.

The only way to help your unique literary voice grow and eventually sing like a glorious creature of wonder is to write what you excites you into a creative passion and brings you pure unadulterated joy.

The only thing faster than the speed of thought is the speed of forgetfulness. Good thing we have other people to help us remember.

Thus, true long-term change is brought about not by destructive passion of the moment but by well-reasoned constructive action. Violent shock of Armageddon that leaves nothing in its wake but a blank slate is not a solution, only a postponement of progress.

Not every puzzle is intended to be solved. Some are in place to test your limits. Others are, in fact, not puzzles at all.

The satisfaction of short fiction does not come close to the rich pleasure I get as a writer in the long deep immersion in the same long work and its growing complexity. I suppose you might say I love to wallow in my characters and imaginary worlds. I love to play with the whole necklace, not just one glittering stone.

The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being.

Our world is so bursting-full of natural wonder that we are all experiencing a sensory overload. We are no longer perceiving all of Ú the details, just the ones that immediately interest us.

The master of the garden is the one who waters it, trims the branches, plants the seeds, and pulls the weeds. If you merely stroll through the garden, you are but an acolyte.