No man can rob successfully over a period of years without pleasing the people he robs. - Theodore Sturgeon

Every agent has a Sig Weiss — as a rosy dream. You sit there day after day paddling through oceans of slush, hoping one day to run across a manuscript that means something — sincerity, integrity, high word rates — things like that. You try to understand what editors want in spite of what they say they want, and then you try to tell it to writers who never listen unless they’re talking. You lend them money and psychoanalyze them and agree with them when they lie to themselves. When they write stories that don’t make it, it’s your fault. When they write stories that do make it, they did it by themselves. And when they hit the big time, they get themselves another agent. In the meantime, nobody likes you.

There are only three ways of dealing with sex. It may be gratified; it may be repressed; or it may be sublimated. The latter is, through history, often an ideal and frequently a success, but it is always an instability.

Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose?