You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

Say your name over two hundred times and discover you are no one.

Remember that 'plumber in space' is not such a bad setup for a story.

Go then, there are other worlds than these.

I've always thought it would be fun to update "Hansel and Gretel." I'd have these white parents in the suburbs with an income of fifty or sixty thousand dollars. Daddy loses his job, and the wicked stepmother says, "We could get along, we could keep our Mastercharge, if you'd just get rid of those shitty kids." Finally the father hires a limo and tells the driver, "Drop 'em off on Lenox Avenue in Harlem at two in the morning." These two little white kids land there. They're menaced. And this supposedly nice black lady says, "Would you like some candy?"

No writer, painter, or actor - no artist - is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is 'genius'), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.