william gibson. my affection for this mans writing has run hot and cold from book to book over the years but i am consistently astonished by the man himself. i heard him say once, at a book reading, that he considered illegal copying of his work as an 'organic tax on his celebrity'. simple and brilliant. here is some more simple brilliance i read at his blog thanks to a boingboing tweet:

Q Creator's block. If ever: how long, when/why it happened; or how was it avoided, palliated?
A "Creator's block" sounds like something afflicting a divinity, but writer's block is my default setting. Its opposite is miraculous. The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work. Our traditional cultural models of creativity tend to involve the wrong sort of heroism, for me. "It sprang whole and perfect from my brow" as opposed to "I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me". I was much encouraged, when I began to write, by Manny Farber's idea of "termite art".