Hit them fast, hit them hard, and hit them a lot.

He looked at the pain and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.

No, I'm a man with a rule. People leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don't, I don't.

Some old guy once said that the meaning of life is that it ends.

Evaluate. Long experience had taught me to evaluate and assess. When the unexpected gets dumped on you, don’t waste time. Don’t figure out how or why it happened. Don’t recriminate. Don’t figure out whose fault it is. Don’t work out how to avoid the same mistake next time. All of that you do later. If you survive.

It's a kind of zen question: if you write a book and no one reads it, is it really a book?

I'm not afraid of death. Death's afraid of me.