I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.

Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.

Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve. I was once described by my own son Stephen as an emotional ostrich.

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

I don't even like old cars. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

I spent the first fourteen years of my life convinced that my looks were hideous. Adolescence is painful for everyone, I know, but mine was plain weird.

Stillness is training for action.

You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment.

Or perhaps in Slytherin, you'll make your real friends. Those cunning folk use any means to achieve their ends.

We need people interested, otherwise literally the lights turn off.

A resolute and wise refusal to take part in festivities will be an incentive for introspection and self-purification.

When it comes to bombshells, there are few that can be more effective than that small, flat, frail thing, a letter.

In politics nothing is immutable. Events carry within them an invincible power. The unwise destroy themselves in resistance. The skillful accept events, take strong hold of them and direct them.

I waited a long time out in the world before I gave myself permission to fail. Please don't even bother asking. Don't bother telling the world you are ready. Show it. Do it.