The imagination, freed for just a moment from the ego’s tyranny, can instantly perceive the friendly world we actually inhabit.

The sentences that stay are in service to your story. The ones that are rejected are not.

The experience of writing about their troubles teaches the author how to write about the solution.

If I were honest, I was often bored on those empty summer days.

Life itself, the thing I’m writing about, is always right, is always a perfect, finished story.

If you have ever published anything anywhere there is a good chance your work has influenced someone in some way.

The more unwanted the event, the more necessary is my artistic attention to it.

You may have to get to the end to discover what a story’s actually about, but the finishing isn’t the point.

Something outside of my control would determine how I would feel, the same as the weather determines if I should wear a coat.

All stories are about the exact same thing: someone wants something and they can’t have it.

I don’t like problems, except when I’m willingly giving them my full attention. Then they become something else.

All this resting when I wasn’t tired, sitting when I’d just as soon walk, and consuming but never creating was depleting.

I love ambition. It’s our attempt to see beyond what’s right in front of us, to imagine something beyond what we have and what we’ve known.

Why put something in your story that doesn’t belong, that takes it in the wrong direction?

My ambition is aimed forward, toward creating what will one day exist in the future.