It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.

Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I’ve already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on. Writer’s block is never solved by forcing oneself to “write through it,” because you haven’t solved the problem that caused your unconscious mind to rebel against the story, so it still won’t work – for you or for the reader.

. . . All these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.

He’d undone all he could. You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can’t call back the futures that your bad decisions lost

What am I now, Alai?" "Still good." "At what?" "At--anything. There's a million soldiers who'd follow you to the end of the universe." "I don't want to go to the end of the universe." "So where do you want to go? They'll follow you." I want to go home, thought Ender, but I don't know where it is.