Meet me in Cognito, baby. In Cognito, we'll have nothing to hide.

Serious reading is hardly a social activity and every halfway serious reader is perpetually subject to a form of coitus interruptus. Family members or friends who lack the desire, the courage, or the opportunity to burst in on you when there's some indication that you could be sexually entwined will seldom hesitate to interject themselves between you and a page, even though the act of reading is often as intimate and intense as a full-fledged carnal embrace.

Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines.'

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Danger is to adventure what garlic is to spaghetti sauce. Without it, you just end up with stewed tomatoes.

The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.