All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.

And it's always possible that you will not get a nice review. So - and that's enraging of course, to get a bad review, you can't talk back, and it's sort of shaming in a way.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

Swimming always cleans your soul

I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn't understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people.

(From the story The Last Days of a Famous Mime) He said nothing. He was mildly annoyed at her presumption: that he had not thought this many, many times before. With perfect misunderstanding she interpreted his passivity as disdain. Wishing to hurt him, she slapped his face. Wishing to hurt her, he smiled brilliantly.