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

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.

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 went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.

I have been covered in easy kisses from uneasy lips, and I know I smell weary again.

It’s never come easy for me. I don’t think my mind allows me to rest ever. I have, I think, a chip on my shoulder, and some deep scars that I don’t think were healed.

Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

As individual fingers we can easily be broken, but all together we make a mighty fist.

It is easy to see that when republican virtue fails, slavery ensues.

No one will ever win a 5,000-meter by running an easy two miles. Not against me.

Character is much easier kept than recovered.

I will keep working on different aspects of my games. It’s not so easy, and I need to work on every stroke.