And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.