“Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.”

Readers are made by readers – it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.

Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?

Never give it all. You can never be yourself otherwise.

The pleasure of being bored ismooning about and doing nothing.

The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself

And the price for being a homo-hater should be as high as anyone can pay.

The most memorable people in life will be the friends who loved you when you weren’t very lovable.

Self pity is a disease which does not kill but corrodes.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

If you’re rational and logical, they argue their case rationally and logically. If you’re loyal and faithful, they turn those against you.

We resent being faced with facts we’d prefer to ignore as much as being wrongly accused of doing something we haven’t.

Belief means willing yourself to give all your attention to living with loving gladness in the world you think really exists.

Your weak weaknesses are no use to them…. They find the strongest weaknesses you didn’t know were yours and use those against you.

If you’re passionate and emotional, they make you passionate and emotional about your worse fears.

You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.

I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page – sometimes every word as well.

There’s a lot of insincerity about the actions of our legislators; they create distractions – like this anti-gay law you alluded to – and try to mobilise, to exacerbate people’s emotions. Until the legislators started making laws, people minded, generally, their own business.

Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us in different directions.

When lying, be emphatic and indignant, thus behaving like your children.

Karl Malone’s too high-class for a bum like me.

I’d sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.

One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.

I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you’re ground down by convention. You can’t think as you like and you can’t act as you like. That’s because it’s a democratic nation. I expect America’s worse.

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.