“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.

Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.

Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it’s too late.

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.

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.

In the year 2025, the best men don’t run for president, they run for their lives.

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.

It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.

A good book is an event in my life.

Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

You can read hundreds of spiritual books, study all kinds of scriptures, but the final truth is an experience in silence.

Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.

The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.