No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.

Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative.

We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.

Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.

No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit!