The worst thing about the fantasies of the mentally ill is that they're so damned consistent. They never let up. They never give you any rest.

He jumped at the Giants face, clambered up his lip and nose, and began to dig in the Giant's eye.

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction

You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you'll accomplish and nothing more.