Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.

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.

Sleeping is nice. You forget about everything for a little while.

When I started to paint I felt transported into a kind of paradise... In everyday life I was usually bored and vexed... Starting to paint I felt gloriously free.

Vot is the point of being an international Quidditch player if all the good-looking girls are taken?

It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows by the cultivation of an insignificant life.

You do get the pregnant mush-brain... you know what it's like? It's like getting stoned.

The rule of love, I say again, is not an optional extra. It is the very essence of what we [Christians] are about

In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.

I did not deal well with the politicians. I tend to tell people that when they are full of crap, that they are full of crap.

Whenever I appeared to have won an argument, Mom would say something like, 'Even broken clocks are right twice a day.

Brain surgery is a terrible profession. If I did not feel it will become different in my lifetime, I should hate it.