“The worst mistake a writer can make is to assume everyone has an imagination.”

“It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.”

“...there's no mistake if you can resolve it, whether it's in your music or in your life. Sometimes the mistake motivates you or elevates you to a different circumstance that can be better. If I make a mistake, I'm going to develop that mistake, so it doesn't sound like a mistake. -Dave Brubeck”

“There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.”

“... he felt unusually warm toward humankind. He even thought that it could warm to him. Everyone, all of us, individually facing oblivion as a matter of course, and no one complaining much. As a species, not the best imaginable, but certainly the best, no, the most interesting there was.”

“When you put something down that happened, people often don't believe it; whereas, you can make up anything, and people assume it must have happened to you.”

“Assume that every problem in your life is a lesson to make you stronger. Then you never feel like a victim.”