No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.

Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.