If you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.