“Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

Get busy living or get busy dying.

Go now. Our journey is done. And may we meet again, in the clearing, at the end of the path.

Love isn’t soft, like the poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God’s creatures.

A coward judges all he sees by what he is.

True sorrow is as rare as true love.

Some things were better lost than found.

You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

Don’t give me what I ask for, give me what I need.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.

I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.

The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers….Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.

The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, “What did they teach you?” And she said, “They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room.”

Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

All the darkness of the night is no match for a single candle that refuses to die out.

Before she knew it was candles, did she think she’d done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips.