Characters begin as your children and become your teachers.

Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets.

When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly.

Writers strive for the impossible: perfection. Even the universe is flawed.

Books have a life. They breathe. When you write a book, it grows and changes. You learn from your characters after you create them. They come from you and you become them.

Write what you want to write. That's the only advice a writer will ever need.

Writing is like a religion to those who don't practise, an act of faith for those who do.

Who knows why we do it? And when we've done it, nobody wants it. Still we keep doing it. That's what makes a writer a writer.

Perfection is not something you strive for. Perfection is in the eyes of the beholder. Perfection is a state of grace, of peace of serenity, a moment as fleeting as a smile.

The only prophecy the artist can make with confidence is that he and his message will be misunderstood by a world that values all the wrong things.

I'm my characters' galley slave.

Successful teaching rests both on a genuine and selfless concern for students and on the ability to convey to them a love of history.

Drink not the third glass - which thou can'st not tame when once it is within thee.

Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.

To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right, in peace and war, in council and in fight.

Justification is the truly dramatic transition from the status of a condemned criminal awaiting a terrible sentence to that of an heir awaiting a fabulous inheritance.

Invest at the point of maximum pessimism.

Even a strong man can succumb to the wiles of a pretty girl with pointy shoes.

We talk so much about one's rights... so little about what is actually right.

Birds which are the same color as the foliage in which they nest are less likely to be disturbed by other birds who want to drop in and chat, and therefore last longer.

The comfort of having a friend may be taken away, but not that of having had one.