“A library is a place where you can live a thousand lives. So why are you waiting when you could be living? Visit your library today.”

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

Get busy living or get busy dying.

Go now. Our journey is done. And may we meet again, in the clearing, at the end of the path.

Love isn’t soft, like the poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God’s creatures.

A coward judges all he sees by what he is.

True sorrow is as rare as true love.

Some things were better lost than found.

You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

Don’t give me what I ask for, give me what I need.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.

I revise the manuscript till I can’t read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it’s retyped again. Then there’s a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.

There is no book so bad that some good can not be got out of it.

A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one’s movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.

To whom do I give my new elegant little book? Cui dono lepidum novum libellum?

A book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf – at any rate it is safer from criticism.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

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.