“The purpose of life is not to be happybut to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.”

“The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.”

“I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.”

“Anybody who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.”

“People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.”

“Extremists think 'communication' means agreeing with them.”

“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.”