“Belief means willing yourself to give all your attention to living with loving gladness in the world you think really exists.”

Never give it all. You can never be yourself otherwise.

The pleasure of being bored ismooning about and doing nothing.

The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself

And the price for being a homo-hater should be as high as anyone can pay.

The most memorable people in life will be the friends who loved you when you weren’t very lovable.

Self pity is a disease which does not kill but corrodes.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

If you’re rational and logical, they argue their case rationally and logically. If you’re loyal and faithful, they turn those against you.

We resent being faced with facts we’d prefer to ignore as much as being wrongly accused of doing something we haven’t.

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

Your weak weaknesses are no use to them…. They find the strongest weaknesses you didn’t know were yours and use those against you.

If you’re passionate and emotional, they make you passionate and emotional about your worse fears.

You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.

I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page – sometimes every word as well.

Sometimes the course of our lives depends on what we do or don’t do in a few seconds, a heartbeat, when we either seize the opportunity, or just miss it.

Become more and more attractive and impressive, and you see that in fact they are beautiful. Not conventionally beautiful, not celebrity beautiful, but beautiful all through.