You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.

Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.

Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.

We choose--or choose not--to be alone when we decide whom we will accept as our fellows, and whom we will reject. Thus an eremite in a mountain is in company, because the birds and coneys, the initiates whose words live in his 'forest books,' and the winds--the messengers of the Increate--are his companions. Another man, living in the midst of millions, may be alone, because there are none but enemies and victims around him.

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.