When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

A character has a distinctive voice - you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you're out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it's the character speaking and not you.

As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It's really simply to do with refusing new experience.

Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

There’s no story that’s the start of itself.