I Wouldn't Like To Be A Character

Writing Is Like Everything Else: The More You Do It The Better You Get. Don't Try To Perfect As You Go Along, Just Get To The End Of The Damn Thing. Accept Imperfections. Get It Finished And Then You Can Go Back. If You Try To Polish Every Sentence There's A Chance You'll Never Get Past The First Chapter.

People Were Always Sorry. Sorry They Had Done What They Had Done, Sorry They Were Doing What They Were Doing, Sorry They Were Going To Do What They Were Going To Do; But They Still Did Whatever It Is. The Sorrow Never Stopped Them; It Just Made Them Feel Better. And So The Sorrow Never Stopped.

Stories Set In The Culture In Which Things Went Wrong Tended To Start With Humans Losing Or Forgetting Or Deliberately Leaving Behind Their Terminal. It Was A Conventional Opening, The Equivalent Of Straying Off The Path In The Wild Woods In One Age, Or A Car Breaking Down At Night On A Lonely Road In Another.

It Was A Truism That All Civilizations Were Basically Neurotic Until They Made Contact With Everybody Else And Found Their Place Within The Ever-changing Meta-civilisation Of Other Beings, Because, Until Then, During The Stage When They Honestly Believed They Might Be Entirely Alone In Existence, All Solo Societies Were Possessed Of Both An Inflated Sense Of Their Own Importance And A Kind Of Existential Terror At The Sheer Scale And Apparent Emptiness Of The Universe.

What Is Any Achievement, However Great It Was, Once Time Itself Is Dead?