A few brilliant bits of advice I've stumbled across in the writings of Thomas Harris. Enjoy!
“The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.”
“Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”
“Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.”
“You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.”
“The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.”
“I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”
“Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis”
“Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.”
“Silence can mock.”
“There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named -- the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.”
“What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.”
“We assign a moment to decision, to dignify the process as a timely result of rational and conscious thought. But decisions are made of kneaded feelings; they are more often a lump than a sum.”
“You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust...you owe me awe.”