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

Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.

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.

But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.

Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark

Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.