A good book should leave you....slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

Surprise keeps the reader awake. The only alternative is to continue saying what the reader is expecting. What fun is that?

His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say.

The you that goes in one side of the meditation experience is not the same you that comes out the other side.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

Some people with awful cards can be successful because of how they deal with the tragedies they're handed, and that seems courageous to me.

As soon as you get over caring what people think, you can have a nice time.

I always dreamed of going out to space. The idea of going to a planet where nobody's ever been is attractive to me, it just suits my nature.

The frequencies in my head are not known to normals!

The voice of America has no undertones or overtones in it. It repeats its optimistic catchwords in a tireless monologue that has the slightly metallic sound of a gramophone.