“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot.

What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.

In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.

You can’t trust other people. If it’s important, you have to do it yourself.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

I am selfish, private, and easily bored. Will this be a problem?

It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.

You get what anybody gets – you get a lifetime.

Black as night, sweet as sin.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.

Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

It’s not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it’s yours, and then be willing to let it go.

We often confuse what we wish for with what is.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

I must have books everywhere. They’re the soul of a room-they reveal the taste, the interests, and the secrets of whoever lives there.

I never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change history. It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

When you’re playing a character in a book, there’s already a lot of pressure because all of the millions of people who have read the series have been able to envision and become very attached to the characters.

As a child, my whole life was books. They were my fantasy. That’s where I could go. That was a lot of times [what] saved me.

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.