But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

Reflections, a book of essays and non-fiction by Diana Wynne Jones.

‘I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things.

A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love.

Make good art.

James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks.

The miracle of prose is this: it begins with the words. What we, as authors, give to the reader isn’t the story. We don’t give them the people or the places or the emotions. What we give the reader is a raw code, a rough pattern, loose architectural plans that they use to build the book themselves. No two readers can or will ever read the same

I do not care – I do not believe it matters – whether these books are paper or digital, whether you are reading on a scroll or scrolling on a screen. The content is the important thing.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.