A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

Really?""No. I'm being ironic. Or is it sarcastic? I can never remember.""Irony's cleverer, so you're probably being sarcastic.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

You really need to stop Googling yourself and start being an artist.

I've never told anybody this, so I don't know if maybe you shouldn't print it, but I've made plans. I'm only going to continue doing this for another 25 years.

I could release myself into acting in a way that I was not released socially.

I don't have to be anybody I'm not.

Don't worry about what the people say; be yourself, say what you want to say WITH respect.

I think politics can no longer be assigned to parliamentary activity and it probably never could be. But politics with a small p and the history of trade union movement really interests me.

The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.

We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures.