The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic, " Richard told me. "And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.

That's okay, " I said. "We're writers. We make things up.

You can't possibly know that you're going to be a writer!" Miss Frost said. "It's not a career choice.

Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can't turn you away.

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?

It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.

You have to live in the world to say anything meaningful about it.

Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live.

The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.

Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.

To be quite honest my country [Colombia] still shows that it can be intolerant.

I'm dominant every night. I come in every night and get beat up. I never make a face when they try to flagrant or hack-a-Shaq me, because I'm not from this planet. Earthlings don't faze me.

They don't tell you this in school, Everybody plays the fool.

Yes, and I’m sure the arena will be full of bags of flour for me to chuck at people.

There is no end to the power a man can obtain.