“It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's.”

“But see that you get on. That's your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.”

“Because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and its so sad—”

“remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents.”

“Keeping up the fiction. You have to keep it up, sometimes, no matter how you feel.”

“But people love a hypocrite, you know——they recognize one of their own, and it always feels so good when someone gets caught with his pants down and his dick up and it isn't you.”

“My own gut feeling is that everyone's psychic...and it's so ingrained a part of us that we very rarely notice it. The talent may be largely preventative, and that keeps it from being noticed, too.”