Night falls fast. Today is the past.

Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.

Suffering is universal.

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.

But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.

Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.