The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.

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.

But she always sweetly and tenderly called him Mungo for it was Mungo and his words of truth that had finally set her free.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

The oven became hotter and hotter, and Hansel began to sweat. Then a delicious smell wafted to his nostrils. Oh no! he thought. I'm cooking! He sniffed at the air. And I smell delicious!

And just in case you need reminding, you are beautiful

I'll show you Obama's birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma.

Elation and pain are experiences that make you realize youre alive. Thank God you feel them; otherwise youd be numb.

I am like Dante, I walk through hell, but I am not burning.

All one has to do to gather a large crowd in New York is to stand on the curb a few minutes and gaze intently at the sky.

I'm not going to have a perfect career. It's better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.

It is a kind of self-projection of our sins when we insist on other people becoming good. In reality, we wish to become good, but because we are unable to, we demand it of others and insist on this.