The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.

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.

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

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.

Thy heart had gone too far in this world, and think thou to comprehend the way of the most High?

Beauty itself is a painful convulsion in the heart, an abundance of vitality in the soul, and a mad chase undertaken by the spirit until it encounters the heavens.

A cheerful music is a powerful light for the shadows of sorrow!

Anger repressed can poison a relationship as surely as the crudest words.

The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.

Out here where the world begins and ends, it’s like nothing ever stops happening.

It took the mob only a moment to remove his head; a century will not suffice to reproduce it.

All of the directors I've worked with I have loved and would work with again. I have no favorites.

What are you doing?" she asked, trying to raise herself. "First, I thought I'd show you what a pity it would be if they cut off my wicked tongue.

Confidences are always risky: a secret entrusted to a stranger make him less of one. You've given away something of yourself, given him the advantage.