Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.

Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.

Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.

A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.

There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.

She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.

I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.

Never grow weary of doing good.

He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.

Who are we to question God’s decisions about where we’ll be born?…God does what He chooses without asking our opinions. Of that I’m sure.

it is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything

So upright Quakers please both man and God.

Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?

I think the biggest problem working with me would be that I'm an only child, and so I have an internal dialogue that goes on that I just assume you can hear.

It's living - a broad spectrum of living - that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.

All my life I've been terrible at remembering people's names. I once introduced a friend of mine as Martini. Her name was actually Olive.

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent, Of everything you think, And of everything you do, Is for yourself - And there isn’t one.