I realized you might make money at writing, and you might even make a living at it. So after that I didn't write stories just for the class but wrote them for the purpose of submitting them somewhere, and at some point in the process, I began writing them just to please myself and that's where you begin to see the real value of a life of writing.

Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.

Change isn't easy... changing the way you live means changing what you believe about life. That's hard... When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change because the misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.

The word impossible contains the word possible' What's that-- some Zen thing?' I think Star Trek. Mr. Spock.

the worst happens when you least expect it

Is rule of thumb in writing game: if story requires many long descriptions of smells so vile that will give reader nausea, is not likely to find publisher.

I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.