“The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.”

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it.

The light is the left hand of darkness.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

First sentences are doors to worlds.

No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:

By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.

My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.

As men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality.

Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.

A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

I love love stories, no matter how dark.

There are certainties in existence, but love is something much harder to define than light and dark, life and death. I think saying you are “like” someone in love sounds right.

This was pointed out to me by somebody who referred to the paintings of Rembrandt and his use of light: some elements are highlighted while others are obscured or even pushed back into the dark.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

I’m not sure how to describe my style. A lot of my work is dark and looks a bit sad, which is strange because I’m such a smiley, over-the-top positive guy who wears gold shoes most days.

My soul gathers the breaths of my sanity and beholds them in the jar like fireflies on a dark night.

The only morality in a cruel world is chance.

I’m the ruler in my kingdom and my dark seat is hot. Step into my world and your heartbeat stop!