“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.”

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 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.

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

All my life’s about is cracking up people and them cracking me up and trying not to think about dying. That doesn’t cost very much money.

When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.

Why do you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery’s dead?

The young man, born to rule England, which his dying father commended to him. Once his father is dead, London will cavil. The kingdom is taken back from his son.

You are what it feels like to watch the final silvers of sun fall and die into the silver ocean; tangerine sky giving way to moon-glow and starlight.

I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all.

Hypocrisy is the characteristic feature of the dying bourgeois epoch.

The sudden death of the leading man will cause change, making another man leader. Soon, but too late, the young man will attain high office. By land and sea, he will be feared.