You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

There is an absolute power that truly empowers without corrupting

Girls who are on top of things must have three hundred ways of responding to tired thirty-five-year-old divorced men.

I have seen Ikpea too. Ikpea is not dead

There was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy.

Who doesn't like money? I love money. Why not. My subject matter will change when I get to that point.

What I'm going to miss is the competition, being, that's OK, I can watch from the house.

Life like an empty dream flits by.

I am a middle-aged opera queen in loafers that makes out I am a 16 year old death metal skater... It's all fake! My hair is fake, my body is fake and my teeth are kind of fake

Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something.... If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ignominiously.

Be confident, cheerful and contented. The mind can produce any degree of contentment and peace. To generate these, no other agency or help is required.