Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Don't write your books for people who won't like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write, and don't try to please readers who like something different.

The silver lining of those years when I was trying to get 'Tinkers' published but couldn't were the years when I had to decide, Why do I want to be a writer? I realized that writing is the thing itself; writing is not a means to publication, writing is not a predicate of publication, so I spent years making art for art's sake.

I was just delighted to be a legitimate, for-real published author.

In the past, a writer had to go outside and get to know others before learning about their work, but the Internet has made humanity more accessible for misanthropes like me. I read blogs, tweets, Facebook posts and Reddit threads where people detail their jobs.

If the Internet, ubiquitous as it now is, proves too dangerous in the hands of the psychologically fragile, perhaps access to it ought to be restricted. We ban drunks from driving because they're a danger to others. Isn't it time we did the same to trolls?

AI is a tool. The choice about how it gets deployed is ours.

We're making this analogy that AI is the new electricity. Electricity transformed industries: agriculture, transportation, communication, manufacturing.