Please, don't torture me with cliches. If you're going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors.

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.

Perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos

Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.

Authors of so-called 'literary' fiction insist that action, like plot, is vulgar and unworthy of a true artist. Don't pay any attention to misguided advice of that sort. If you do, you will very likely starve trying to live on your writing income. Besides, the only writers who survive the ages are those who understand the need for action in a novel.

In a clutch or a corner, I tend to make a weapon out of what is near at hand. That can be anything from a crowbar to a cat, though if I had a choice, I would prefer an angry cat, which I have found to be more effective than a crowbar. Although weaponless, I left the house by the back door, with two chocolate-pumpkin cookies. It's a tough world out there, and a man has to armor himself against it however he can. ~Odd Thomas