My total year's income from working as hard as I possibly could from writing went from like $30 one year to about $70 the next year. And it made me realize that maybe you couldn't really pay the rent that way.

In a certain sense, this guy - who is one of the most evil people in the book - he's not really that bad at running the show, because he knows what he's doing, he's smart and he's got the big picture in mind. He's like the Godfather.

When tending a vast and beautiful garden, you have to plant many seeds, never knowing ahead of time which ones will germinate, which will produce the most glorious flowers, which will bear the sweetest fruit. A good gardener plants them all, tends and nurtures them, and wishes them well. Optimism is the best fertilizer.

Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.

I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication.

One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not be the center of the universe.

We each have our lives... What matters is not how long those lives last, but what we do with them.