It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.

When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even binds our five disparate senses. James Geary's fascinating and utterly readable I is an Other brings the news on metaphor from literature and economics, from neuroscience and politics, illuminating topics from consumer behavior to autism spectrum disorders to the evolution of language. As a writer, as a teacher, and as someone just plain fascinated by how our minds work, I've been waiting years for exactly this book.

Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.