It's important to have your private enjoyments because sometimes that's all we have.

The day misspent, the love misplaced, has inside it the seed of redemption. Nothing is exempt from resurrection.

Small presses take chances. Chances are at the heart of all the literature we later know as great.

I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy.

As for reality, I don't even have any interest in that word.

Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable. A place with its own harvest.

Failure: the renewable resource.

What keeps me writing is that I can only know through writing. My major sense organ is apparently a pencil.

A too closely watched flower/blossoms the wrong color./Excess attention to the jonquil/turns it gentian. Flowers/need it tranquil to get/their hues right. Some/only open at midnight.

A lot of the job that one has to do as a writer is to protect the thing that doesn't match the world.

It isn't ever delicate to live.

If you don't know everything, you must go on with what you do know.

You can get through anything that life throws at you”.

It is the mark of the cultured man that he is aware of the fact that equality is an ethical and not a biological principle

There was a time when my whole life was in chaos, really, and I didn't help myself sort it out. But one day I came to my senses, and I think I was lucky because a lot of people don't.

Keep your mind young by continuing to learn about your business.

Willem, I suspect deep down you know exactly why you're here, exactly what you want, but you're unwilling to the wanting, let alone the having. Because both of those propositions are terrifying.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

I needed to become something besides the star everybody had built me up to be.

Hope for the best, be prepared for the worse. Life is shocking, but you must never appear to be shocked. For no matter how bad it is it could be worse and no matter how good it is it could be better.

I really hate pain. I'd pull my own soul out if it meant I could stop the pain.