The way I cook it's more like mad science. There's a lot of inspiration and dramatic failure with the occasional gorgeous success.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned

The world is a mess and I just need to rule it.

Half of seeming clever is keeping your mouth shut at the right times.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

It was wise enough to know itself, and brave enough to be itself, and wild enough to change itself while somehow staying altogether true.

If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember that true stories seldom take the straightest way

There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.

Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.

Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.

LOOK AT HIM! Mum, LOOK! OUR NEW DOG! ISN’T HE A BEAUTY?”“Another DOG!” came Maia’s amazed voice.

I never admired another's fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.

What do you actually need? Food, clothing and shelter. Everything else is entertainment.

The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated.

There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.