“Read a lot. Reading really helps. Read anything you can get your hands on.”

Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

Depression is deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it’s a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel.

Sometimes ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works.

To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.

What’s most important in a friendship? Tolerance and loyalty.

Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again.

Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.

I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.

It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.

It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.

It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love.

When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.

Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

We have to choose between what is right, and what is easy.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.

Achievable goals are the first step to self improvement.