Don’t worry: These ramblings will not be insufferably gloomy…. When at first I proved unable to keep the tone light, Ozzie suggested that I be an unreliable narrator. “It worked for Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” he said. In that first-person mystery novel, the nice-guy narrator turns out to be the murderer of Roger Ackroyd, a fact he conceals from the reader until the end. Understand, I am not a murderer. I have done nothing evil that I am concealing from you. My unreliability as a narrator has to do largely with the tense of certain verbs…. - Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas

The door had been locked from the inside. The windows were barred, locked from the inside, didn't open and were made of brick. All the books were chained to the shelf save one, open on the table at a page entitled 'How to secure a room from the inside'. All the boxes had been ticked. And even the pen used to make the ticks was one of those ones on a little chain you get in banks.- John Finnemore, Souvenir Programme

You are not the next Stephen King. You are not the next Emma Bull. You are not the next anyone. You are the very first you. - Seanan McGuire

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original. Whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence about how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. - CS Lewis