“If Hell is other people... then Purgatory is airports.”

“There must be a Hell. A place for demons. A place for the damned. Hell is Heaven's reflection. Heaven's shadow. They define each other. There must be a Hell for without Hell, Heaven has no meaning.--Remiel”

“You can't trust other people. If it's important, you have to do it yourself.”

“Most of us find our own voices only after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people.”

“You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.”

“It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.”

“Tell your story. Don't try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Any starting writer starts out with other people's voices. But as quickly as you can start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there will always be better writers than you and there will always be smarter writers than you, but you are the only you.”