The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Time is how you spend your love.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

There was no slow build. No peaceful meander to the summit. It was like sheet lighting stretching across a stormy sky—beautiful and blinding. I leaned forward and seized his mouth with mine.

Fear leads to worry. Worry leads to depression. But faith overcomes fear and worry.

Perhaps fate brought us together, And the incidents in between made us close, Falling in love was a simple choice, But breaking my heart, that was yours.

I was always on my oddy knocky.

There is no country that has the best men.

I think of my body as a side effect of my mind. Like a thought I had once that manifested itself-- Oops! Oh no! Manifested. Look at this. Now we have to buy clothes and everything.

George Bush and his gang imagine they are being political geniuses.

...I've learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them-business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye.

Any man is educated who knows where to get knowledge when he needs it, and how to organize that knowledge into definite plans of action.

The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.