Madness, and then illumination.

Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way.

The Lord took twice the time making thee, Alvin Smith, cause it took that long to put the mischief in.

You have to measure your success by the way your audience responds to your games. No matter how small that audience is, it's yours. Your game is part of the lives and the memories of those people in a way that WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 or Windows can never be.

The world was full of locked doors, and he had to get his hand on every key.

Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.