Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.

But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream.

It means that no blue ribbon is forever. Someday - if the world doesn't explode itself in the meantime - someone will run a two-minute mile in the Olympics. It may take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.