Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

The whole Melrose series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

Work filled with inspiration is worship. A heart filled with courage is unbreakable. A life filled with gratitude is fulfilled.

When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.

Of the many guests we welcomed to the Mickey Mouse Club, my absolute favorites were the Lennon Sisters.

If you don't follow through on your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable.

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.

I'm always presenting myself with problems to solve as a writer.

I would have set out very quickly the relationship with Europe.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

We cannot win this war on terror if people are undercutting us. And one way to undercut us is to empower Iran.

And I would hear yet once before I perish The voice which was my music... Speak to me!