Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

Don't let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don't let there be air; or Don't be. I suppose you could say that.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.

Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?