I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

Competition means decentralized planning by many separate persons.

I found that female pathfinders generally integrate characteristics commonly associated with being women - like the capacity to be intimate - with 'male' ones like ambition and courage.

I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.

One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God.

You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.

The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.

This is a tragic world we live in.

Those bad times are important. They give you a chance to practice, listen, take stock, have a life, get your feet back on the ground, and maybe you'll live to tell the story.

The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others.