“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.”

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

You fail only if you stop writing.

You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

There’s no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it’s immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.

There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true – hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.

You’ve been put on the world to love the act of being alive.

An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.

If someone tells you to do something for money, tell them to go to hell.

I was born in London and raised in Rome until I was 4. Then we went back to London, where I went to school.

Incessant falls teach men to reform, and distress rouses their strength. Life springs from calamity, and death from ease.

We are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

I don’t think I was born beautiful. I just think I was born me.

In soft regions are born soft men.

It should not prejudice my voice that I’m not born a man, if I say something advantageous to the present situation. For I’m taxed too, and as a toll provide men for the nation.

It is a law of nature that fainthearted men should be the fruit of luxurious countries, for we never find that the same soil produces delicacies and heroes.