The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure.

He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity.

I loved the fact that I was suddenly no longer dependent on whether a store took out an ad in the right place, or on the word on the street.

Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.