True understanding is the spur of genius

When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.

Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison.

Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to - by gender, sex, race, religion, age - is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.