She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

Loving someone unconditionally is the ultimate joy

If your friend is critical [of your work], you have to have a very thick skin and a thick skin is something that only builds up after it's callused for awhile.

How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don't you ask him? And besides, maybe we'd all like to be like Miles, and just haven't got the guts.

The most terrifying things in the universe came from human minds.

Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.

I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits.

Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

The soul of man... is a portion or a copy of the soul of the Universe and is joined together on principles and in proportions corresponding to those which govern the Universe.

Every wind is fare when we are flying from misfortune.