Masochism is a valuable job skill.

By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

Picture the moment when your mom and dad first saw you as something other than a pretty, tiny version of them. You as them, but improved. Better educated. Innocent. Then picture when you stopped being their dream.

What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.

A writer's job is to cultivate what can go wrong. You're always looking for that dramatic arc of where things can fail.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.