Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
"We are all searching for something, but we don't always know what it is. Sometimes it's a person, sometimes it's a place, and sometimes it's just a feeling."
"We are all the sum of our memories, but what happens when those memories are erased or altered? Do we become someone else, or do we remain the same person, just with a different past?"
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do this best, for me.
"With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one—but no one at all—can tell you what to read and when and how."
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
