“All your questions can be answered if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.”

In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.

You can’t trust other people. If it’s important, you have to do it yourself.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

I am selfish, private, and easily bored. Will this be a problem?

It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.

You get what anybody gets – you get a lifetime.

Black as night, sweet as sin.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.

Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

It’s not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it’s yours, and then be willing to let it go.

We often confuse what we wish for with what is.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

We learn our lessons; we get hurt; we want revenge. Then we realize that actually, happiness and forgiving people is the best revenge.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

People always ask me, ‘What is it that you regret?’ And I say, ‘nothing because I could not buy what I’ve learned.’ And I apply those things to my life I learn. And hopefully, hopefully it helps me to be a better human in the future and make better choices.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?

By seeking and blundering we learn.

We’ve got to learn to love appearances.