Solitude and quiet are highly desirable, but the lack of them is no barrier to writing... The will to work builds all the seclusion that one needs.

It isn't that inspiration doesn't exist, but it comes only with writing.

Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem.

There isn't, unfortunately, any way of discovering whether you can write a publishable novel except by writing it.

I've no desire to be ill-dressed; but I hate the feeling that I daren't be ill-dressed if I want to.

Writing's not always a pleasure to me, but if I'm not writing every other pleasure loses its savour.

It is not the destination that matters, but how one arrives there.

I only have to stop the puck not beat it to death.

Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... but how much love we put in that action.

With my sport, I am outside and in the water, which can be really drying and damaging to the skin, so I try to be vigilant about taking good care of it.

Do today's duty, fight to-day's temptation; and do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things which you cannot see, and could not understand if you saw them.

Make creativity your religion... because creating is soulful work.

I am a man of principle, and one of my basic principles is flexibility.

What is the first part of politics? Education. The second? Education. And the third? Education.

The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.

Stubborness is believing in yourself when nobody else does.