“One very gratifying compliment I sometimes hear is that women want to be my best friend. This endlessly amuses my actual best friend, Jocelyn, because in her estimation Im 'a good friend, but not t...”

“If you believe in yourself and work hard, your dreams will come true”

“There was no whimsical sip of wine at Thanksgiving for us kids while we were still teenagers. This was the Clinton era, and my parents were already worried about the moral deterioration of the coun...”

“...you need the tiniest bit of bravery. People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you're succeeding. People do not get scared when you are failing. It calms them...”

“If you've got it, flaunt it. And if you don't got it? Flaunt it. 'Cause what are we even doing here if we're not flaunting it?”

“I am the kind of person who, if my feelings are unrequited, can completely detach from someone emotionally if I simply put my mind to it.”

“If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

“I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen' 'You make it sound so simple.''It is simple,...”

“Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?""Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood ou...”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

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

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“To write is to stand at the edge of a bottomless well, unafraid of falling in.”

“But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or no...”

“So here I am writing my zombie story and my lead character decides to betray me.”