No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

It is no use trying to sum people up.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]

anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?

As soon as we ask whether or not a story is true in the present moment, we empower ourselves to re-frame it.

There is a wellspring of life within you where you can go for cleansing and transformation.

God helps them that helps themselves.

I think for the most part people are proud of the bicultural foundation New Zealand is built on and the fact that we are a multicultural society.

With a television series, there's a hard deadline, and so you have to write even when you're not writing well.

I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

Don't get angry. Try not to speak roughly or use harsh words.

I'm not OK, you're not OK-and that's OK.

I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than... is where it all comes from.