Don't give up your dreams.
In life we're most hell-bent on proving things that we're not really sure are true.
My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.
High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.
I don't think it's shameful to admit that some days your time can be better spent reading than writing.
The best part of being a writer for me is immersing myself in a fictional world, which is the opposite of being on social media. At the same time, if no one ever read my work, if I was writing solely for myself, I bet it would be lonely and a lot less fun.
I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.
I watch worry and anxiety being pandered to through technology which is neutral.
God is the brave man's hope, and not the coward's excuse.
We should make the poor uncomfortable and kick them out of poverty.
Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s.