“A boy has to peddle his book.”

The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.

Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.

It’s a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

I can see every monster as they come in.

Reading dreams. That’s what started her walking down the road. Every day she’d walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.

Great fury, like great whisky, requires long fermentation.

Are the dead as lonesome as the living?

There is nobody in the world that you can’t get if you really concentrate on it, if you really want them. You’ve got to want it to the exclusion of everything else.

You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

Home is where you feel at home. I’m still looking.

I just live one day at a time. That’s my new theory in life.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

I like books that aren’t just lovely but that have memories in themselves.

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.

Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

It does not matter how many books you have, but how good the books are which you have.

Words have a lot of power.

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.