All education is self-discovery.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

You can find me at three in the morning in my living room with a glass of wine and really bad '90s trip hop beats blaring from my headphones.

I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.

True individuality is the repose arising from the relation of a self to all it has to do with. Bad individuality has in it a separation between outward action and a flat repose inwardly.

I mostly get takeout, I have to admit - I don't know if that's something to be ashamed of. I'm not much of a cook.

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

Frustration and I have become good friends. And like any friend who's a bad influence, frustration sometimes makes me do things that are, in retrospect, stupid. - Sirensong

Sometimes you need to get away for a few weeks just to figure out who you are again.

Here in Beacon, I feel like this was the worst year yet. The entire town, like a lot of winter towns, just kind of holed up in the winter.

I grew up watching British comedy on TV, really.