Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Time is how you spend your love.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.

My mission is not to make him happy and bear his children and be his wife. My mission is to kill him.

Nothing goes with you except the love that you gave away.

cause if you were my girlfriend and a stud like me was livin’ in your house, I’d kiss you in front of the guy every chance I got as a reminder.

You win them to what you win them with.

It is better to be wrong than correct with no desire to be.

You could teach [George] Carlin in college. It's the construction of the word and the order of things and how they go. How all those sentences are timed perfectly.

Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.

No one can take the place of a friend, no one.

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.