“The simplest questions are the most profound.”

Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.

You teach best what you most need to learn.

In order to win, you must expect to win.

If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.

Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours.

Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.

I’ve spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!

True love stories never have endings.

Get this in mind early: We never grow up.

I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and have somebody who feels the same way about me.

If it’s never our fault, we can’t take responsibility for it. If we can’t take responsibility for it, we’ll always be its victim.

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.

Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.

Learning is finding out what you already know.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

Now the answer … is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?

Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.

I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.

Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.