In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

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.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.

Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.