If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

I don't think you should ever insult people unintentionally: if you're doing it, you ought to mean it.

Tristan and Yvaine were happy together. Not forever-after, for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse, but they were happy, as these things go, for a long while

The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.

If not for Death, they’d be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning — a boundary beyond which the living cannot cross.

I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.

Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.