Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.

Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.

The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.

Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.

When you teach your students that it's "economically rational" to commit crimes where the fines for misconduct are lower than the expected return on the crime, you instill a professional ethic that has no room for morals.

The other one I did was "I, Robot." I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.