I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.

After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.

I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.

I myself have 12 hats and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself.

Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.

The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.

I used to act in college, but always comedy. Didn't do [William] Shakespeare - did Ben Jonson.

But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.

Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.

Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat.

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.

Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.

I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.

A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.

But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.

They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.

He considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.

You meet the same people on the way down that you meet on the way up, but you're going the other way.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

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