Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

The world is always ending, for someone.

Hey, that's life, flick it off if you can't take a joke.

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. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.

What makes you think I'm giving you a ride?” “Because I'm a damsel in distress,” she said. “And you are a knight in whatever. A really dirty car.