“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be.”

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it… Success is shy – it won’t come out while you’re watching.

Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.

Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you

Vanity, fear, desire, competition – all such distortions within our own egos – condition our vision of those in relation to us.

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.

In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.

A bedroom is just as nice as whoever sleeps in it with you.

We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we’re doing, if we’re selling it, if the listener likes us.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

I will be rich or I will die trying.

Just ’cause something’s popular, it can still be good. In fact, if more people are buying it, then you must be doing something right.

Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

It will soon be 25 years from the date of publication of my first research work. That the scientific aspirations kindled by that early work did not suffer extinction has been due entirely to the opportunities provided for me by the great city of Calcutta.

We may be weak, but looking at our weakness will never make us strong.

It will not be an activity in which all people can participate.