Sometimes you have intuitive insight about how you think things are going to be, and you write that. Other times you fantasize completely, which has nothing to do with predicting the future.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing.

sloughing my skin / escaping it's grip / stripped of my wit / it hurts to be me .

I don’t know. She was a sweet girl. As sweet as they come. I don’t know why I didn’t love her. It’s something you can’t really control.

To be practical in life means to take everything seriously and nothing tragically.

Commitment is that turning point in your life when you seize the moment to alter your destiny.

The fact is that, under a capitalistic system, the ultimate bosses are the consumers. The sovereign is not the state, it is the people.

Men of genius are meteors destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.

A high heart ought to bear calamities and not flee them, since in bearing them appears the grandeur of the mind and in fleeing them the cowardice of the heart.

The fight for freedom must go on until it is won; until our country is free and happy and peaceful as part of the community of man, we cannot rest.

I can't tell you how many people would say to me as a teenager, 'Why don't you grow up and start thinking about getting a real job?