One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.

What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.

The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.

Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.

I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.

I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.

Simplicity is a sign of being awake.

There are no heroes...in life, the monsters win.

If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too

In these tough economic times, everybody has to cut back. I am down to three tabs of ecstasy a day.

I started watching The Stooges religiously and obsessively when I was probably about four or five years old till around the age of 18.

Am I now ready to make some changes.

The mind forever turns on the lathe of its own contradictions.

One thing that annoys me is when you see women in these terrible and incredible situations with perfectly glossed lips. You're not going to look good in the apocalypse.

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

I've carved out a career for myself really as a writer.