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

I will not compromise on language or content. At 15, people can handle the same language as me, they’re just as complicated as me and are very interested in thinking about important questions for the first time.

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.

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.

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

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.

A friend that ain’t in need is a friend indeed.

We had friends who had a hit single on the radio and sold 500,000 records, and then they couldn’t get arrested a year later.

Alas! if my best Friend, who laid down His life for me, were to remember all the instances in which I have neglected Him, and to plead them against me in judgment, where should I hide my guilty head in the day of recompense?

Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.

I just lost my best friend, I have been crying hysterical for a full day.

Well, we must be jolly old-fashioned then,’ said Bessie. ‘Because we not only believe in the Faraway Tree and love our funny friends there, but we go to see them too – and we visit the lands at the top of the Tree as well!

Maria Canals-Barrera is Cuban and from Miami and I’m part Cuban and from Miami, so needless to say she became a quick friend.

I don’t necessarily sit down and talk to my friends about all the things that I write my music about, because it’s easier for me to write music than to sit and talk to my friends about it sometimes- it’s almost like writing in a diary.