"What great writers do is practice the art of looking for the Undiscovered Countries inside every story—because every book ever written is just a torch being carried into an incredibly deep, incredibly dark cavern of the imagination, illuminating only a small portion of the potential ideas it contains.  What remains hidden in the shadows is a rich source of inspiration for your own work—if you know how to mine it."

"Every single novel owes a debt to books that came before it."