“Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.”

“I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.”

“If you do what we ask you to do, the victories will belong to you, and the losses to me.”

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”

“If you make every game a life-and-death thing, you’re going to have problems. You’ll be dead a lot.”

“Americans do seem to say things which make the English notice England.”

“Being in an M.F.A. is like living in a sci-fi biosphere on an alien planet, where everyone shares your obscure visionary notions: namely, that literature matters, that English professors know more than other people, that typing, alone, in a library, is what everyone should be doing on a Friday night. Better to tell strangers that speaking Klingon is what turns you on.”