“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”

“All authors go to heaven; we have paid our dues on earth by choosing to the hellish career of writing”

“...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.”

“See confusion as confusion. Acknowledge suffering as suffering. Feel pain and sorrow and divisiveness. Experience anger or fear or shock for what they are. But you don't have to think of them as evil - as intrinsically bad, as needing to be destroyed or driven from our midst. On the contrary, they need to be absorbed, healed, made whole. (15)”

“If suffering through four years of hellishly misguided big government is the price we pay for true reform, it may in the end be worth it.”

“If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it's not so bad.”