Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.

For the record, I don't expect you to believe any of this. Not really. I'm a liar by trade, after all; albeit, I like to think, an honest liar.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.

So, having found a lady, could you not have come to her aid, or left her alone? Why drag her into your foolishness?' 'Love,' he explained. She looked at him with eyes the blue of the sky. 'I hope you choke on it,' she said, flatly.

Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.