Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get. But there is luck, and it helps.

Leave no path untaken.

It doesn't matter that I can't remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.

You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they've served their purpose. But you've got to learn to throw things away eventually.

There's none so blind as those who will not listen.

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.