A biography for Anne McCaffreyhasn’t been written yet.
“That's such a thrill - a story I wrote at the beginning of my career, and it's still packin' the house.”
“I do outlines when I'm writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom.”
“Mostly I'm telling people that they don't have to be victims.”
“The tears I feel todayI'll wait to shed tomorrow.Though I'll not sleep this nightNor find surcease from sorrow.My eyes must keep their sight:I dare not be tear-blinded.I must be free to talkNot choked with grief, clear-minded.My mouth cannot betrayThe anguish that I know.Yes, I'll keep my tears til later:But my grief will never go.”
“speak hard, steal the air.”
“Harper, treat your words with careFor they may cause joy or despairSing your songs of health and loveOf dragons flaming from above”
“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.”
“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.”
“At age 77, I need the help of someone with more energy than I can now summon to finish a book.”
“I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I'm very fond of the Talent series, and also the Crystal Singer trio.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Children's voices - even those who couldn't carry the tune - are always appealing.”
“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.”