There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

Mediocrity is contextual.

I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.