The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

I use a lot of similes and metaphors when I work, simply because it's my best way of describing a building or a scene. I'm terrible at describing landscapes - trees, buildings. The inanimate things don't interest me: I always think, "Oh, no, here comes another building I have to describe." So I usually use a simile or metaphor.

...pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.

It came to me that hell would not be fire and smoke after all but arctic, everything white and frigid. Hell would be not anger but indifference.

You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?