You can be the dead fish. I'll be the old stick

That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.

Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that. And no less.

Every writer knows a lot more about their characters and story than actually makes it onto the page.

This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft.

Very little about being a writer is signing an autograph. It's sitting in a room and writing. Getting it out.

The biggest doubts come in the five minutes after I hit send.