Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.

I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will.

Pity is an emotion that can get you killed. The only thing more dangerous is blind hate, and maybe love.

He was twenty. I remembered twenty. I'd known everything at twenty. It took me another year to realize I knew nothing. I was still hoping to learn something before I hit thirty, but I wasn't holding my breath.

Walking your path doesn't mean you don't hurt, it means the pain is worth the progress. Sometimes you have to break something down in order to remake it, and that includes yourself, or it did for me. There were moments when I wept for an easier road, but in the end I would not trade my path for anyone else's. It is mine and the traveling of it has made me who I am, and continues to shape and remold me into the best, happiest, most productive, most playful me, I've ever been.

I just don't believe in helping people who are going to torture me. Though I don't see any bamboo slivers. How can you possibly torture someone without bamboo slivers?

Sometimes love isn't about being smart. Sometimes it's about being stupid together.