"Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg."

"The most common refrain from those of us who are grappling with sluggish stories and dwindling mojo is that we’re just feeling Blah. Our stories are Blah, our writing is Blah. We’ve spent the last two weeks mining our creative depths, and many of us have emerged with too few diamonds and way too many lumps of coal.

Trust the process. If you’re doubting yourself or your story, just keep moving forward. Every year, authors who press on to 50K are treated to the electric moment when the tangle of plots and people we dropped into the first half of our books end up forming unexpected connections. Themes develop. Arcs emerge. Things crackle, then hum, and, at the very end of the month, enough circuits connect that the whole story lights up with a bookish glow."

"For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life."

"If you wait until you’re perfect to make a difference in your life or someone else’s, you’ll be waiting forever. You’ll never be perfect. We can only try to be better than we were the day before."

"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. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that—but you are the only you… There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better—there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can."

"Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."

"Whatever it takes, finish things. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something that you never finish."

"I fall daily in love with impossibilities."