“[when]asked, “What should I do if I want to become a writer?”“Well,” Doris said, with that steely twinkle in her dark eyes, “My best advice foryou, honey, is to stop if you possibly can! And if you just can’t, then get ready to worklike hell. Hang onto your day job. And remember, you may not make a living, but you’llmake a wonderful life.”

“I myself have seen with my own eyes the sybil hanging in a bottle at Cumae. And when the little boys asked her "Sybil, what do you want?" she said, "I want to die.”

“A struggling writer, 'I get hundreds of rejection letters each day. I am depressed with this life, Can you please help?' The Wise-man, 'No, I can’t help. It is good that you are being rejected. The more you get rejection letters, the better your writing will become. Always remember, first they will reject you, then they... ignore you, then they will laugh at you and finally, they may accept you.”

“If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.”

“But really, it’s probably just easiest to keep doing what I’m doing. You know how it goes. At first it’s just for the time being, until you can get your own story together, be the hero in something of your own. You tell people it’s your day job, you tell yourself it’s your day job, and then, at some point, without you noticing, it stops being your day job and just becomes your job.”

“But you make of it [life] what you can, and you do your best to enjoy the hell out of it, because it's the only life you get.”