I could never kill myself. What if it doesn't work. Then I'll have failed at the only thing that could save me from my failures. Where do you go from there?

You can't fill your emails with crap, at least not with my friends, because they're brutal. If something sucks, they'll tell you.

The rules your parents teach you to live by are very different than the rules the world actually runs by. Most of the conventional wisdom is not only wrong, it's a lie told to us by people who want to control us. It doesn't help us, it helps them. Pretty much everything we're told as children (and adults, really) by the established power structures in our lives are made up fairytales us to reinforce that control: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, fat-free frozen dinners, religion, and metering lights on the highway--the list goes on

The thing that I think about the most, and is the most rewarding to me, is the whole past. That I kind of went from nothing to something and I did it on my own, and I did it through hard work and smarts.

No sheep wants to be first through the gate, but every sheep will be second.

Calling one thing 'literature' and another 'fiction' is a way to create status where there is none.

The hardest lesson I've had to learn in my life is that my intelligence is inversely correlated to my humility. The more I thought I knew, the less I actually knew.