A little late, but they are choices from the list I publish at this time most years, so who cares.

Happy new year.

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

– Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

An answer for the rich. Start crying, weep for the miseries that are coming to you. Your wealth is all rotting, your clothes are all eaten up by moths. All your gold and your silver are corroding away, and the same corrosion will be your own sentence, and eat into your body, it was a burning fire that you stored up as your treasure for the last days. Labourers mowed your fields , and you cheated them – listen to the wages that you kept back, calling out, realise that the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. On earth you have had a life of comfort and luxury, in the time of slaughter you went on eating to your heart’s content. It was you who condemned the innocent and killed them, they offered you no resistance.

– The letter of St James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ

And of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them.

– On Writing, Stephen King