His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.

Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do.

Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.

I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines.

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.

Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else.