Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.

Never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

Fame is a skittish jade, more fickle even than Fortune, and apt to shy, and bolt, and plunge away on very trifling causes.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.

Our daily prayer ought to be: Please universe, help me help myself and help me show others how to help themselves.

He hadn’t saved her. He hadn’t even bothered trying.

My mother always told me that no matter how late it is, you take your makeup off. Take it off!

Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it....Like some animal.

Before You Laugh at the Idea of 'DC Fashion Week' Read This

Until the day we die, our lives are unwritten, which is sometimes a terrifying thought.

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.

There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.

If you want to become good at something, do it as often as possible. If you want to become an expert at it, do it every day.

I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America' dies.' Unless I'm completely forgotten, and then it won't say anything at all.