Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

Awkward.That's exactly how it was when we walked over to our sister and stood on each side of her, looking at her and feeling things and not knowing what to do.

You will fall with me as a stone in the grave

Scotland has the only football team in the world that does a lap of disgrace.

Death is a name for beauty not in use.

I won’t even pretend I didn’t care. I wanted to win. I mean, if you don’t care about winning the competition, why show up?

Los Angeles, the sun shines a lot, and it's blue, and there's palm trees; it's a bit like Sydney, I guess, but the underbelly is a vicious, mean, cruel, awful place.

Personally, it's changed my game - it's how I think now. Can't imagine writing more than a paragraph in anything that doesn't do MMD.

And the stuff that I write, is even tougher than dykes.

You know, like high heels are not - , you know the older you get the harder it is to wear them.

An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement.