“Fiction is founded on truth unless things did happen, people couldn’t think of them.”

To count – really and truly to count – a woman must have goodness or brains.

Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

When the fact doesn’t meet the theory then let go the theory.

Courage is the resolution to face the unforeseen.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

It is really a hard life. Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.

It’s not a man’s working hours that are important–it’s his leisure hours. That’s the mistake we all make.

Be sure thy sin will find thee out.

To rush into explanations is always a sign of weakness.

Truth, however bitter, can be accepted, and woven into a design for living.

One is alone when the last one who remembers is gone.

The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

I’m sure you have a theme: the theme of your life. You can embellish it or desecrate it, but it’s your theme, and as long as you follow it, you will experience harmony and peace of mind.

Don’t think. That is the wrong way to bring anything back. Let it go. Sooner or later it will flash into your mind.

It’s what’s in *yourself* that makes you happy or unhappy.

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?

Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.

Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It’s very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.

Fear makes us fiction writers.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

Eventually I realized that Cry Baby was a character that was based off of me, and that we had a lot of similarities.

I feel that entertainment happens when fact and fiction is balanced.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.