The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

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.

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.

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

A truly successful person is not one who achieves his highest ambitions, but one who enjoys helping others reach theirs.

Future is awesome. All we have to do now is to build it.

Even if there were no ear for them but the void, our prayers would still be the only things that sanctify our existence.

Everyone asks about how I'll feel about the tattoos and scars in thirty years. I always say: "I'll like them." I've always loved damaged monuments, in architecture and in humans.

Who watches golf on TV? Who calls eight friends over and gets a keg of beer? Landscapers, I guess. They sit around the TV, yelling, "Will you look at that golf path?Pure pea gravel."

Sometimes I don't understand why I'm sitting here.

The first play I wrote was called 'Twenty-five.' It was played by our company in Dublin and London, and was adapted and translated into Irish and played in America.

We don't propose to sit here in our rocking chair with our hands folded and let the Communists set up any government in the Western Hemisphere.

Though I imagine in your case, trying not to fall just made you fall harder.

I want to be young for the longest time possible.