How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

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.

I like flaws. I think they make things interesting.

The only real certainty is that if you get to live, you gotta die. Live life now.

The trees show definitions of themselves subtly like the face of a man.

The Universe is a friendly place.

We all wish to be brave and strong in the face of disaster. We all wish to be looked up to for our endurance and efforts to help others.

The memory of past troubles is pleasant. [Lat., Jucunda memoria est praeteritorum malorum.]

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

When you're leading, don't talk.

I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent