For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

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.

What worries you, masters you.

He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.

If you're reading this... Congratulations, you're alive. If that's not something to smile about, then I don't know what is.

True friendshipship is like phosphorescence-it glows best when the world around you goes dark.

It seemed pathetic and terrible to me and it still does, that men and women work eight hours a day at jobs that bring them no joy, no reward save a few dollars.

I toured Ontario in the winter of '48, in a touring company of The Drunkard, in which I played the bartender.

I watched the way they looked at each other. Any idiot could see they were in love, even if they were the only two idiots who couldn't.

The only way by which you and I can wean orthodox Hindus from their bigotry is by patient argument and correct conduct.

If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies.

Somebody is n the hospital begging God for the opportunity u have right now. Step into your moment.