Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.

And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.