Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.

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.

Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more.

As he drove away from his handiwork, knowing he'd left no survivors, the killer looked at the rising smoke and gave himself a pat on the back for another assignment well done...

People enjoy doing what they do best.

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

... it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

I like the way you can stretch things out and leave a huge amount of space that, on a record, would feel like silence. I enjoy the possibilities.

What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and left me unfed? Who has seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken?

There's that old saying: Squeeze the juice out of life before life squeezes the juice out of you. I will try to squeeze the remaining juice out of life.