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A book is a dream you hold in your hands

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I don’t ever remember being afraid of “oldness”.There are things I miss about being younger - chiefly the ability to pull all-nighters and keep workin...more

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It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conju...more

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And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

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Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go...more

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Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the pla...more

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Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read.

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If you're making mistakes it means you're out there doing something.

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The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and danc...more

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Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

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The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then ...more

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Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. ...more

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My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each...more

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I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a ...more

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So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made...more