“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?

The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.

Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.

It’s a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

I can see every monster as they come in.

Reading dreams. That’s what started her walking down the road. Every day she’d walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.

Great fury, like great whisky, requires long fermentation.

Are the dead as lonesome as the living?

There is nobody in the world that you can’t get if you really concentrate on it, if you really want them. You’ve got to want it to the exclusion of everything else.

You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

Home is where you feel at home. I’m still looking.

No one is born with self confidence. Self confidence is learned and earned with experience.

I thought I was born to be with you but actually we weren’t meant to be.

The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty.

No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate, they know that this is the place that we were born and raised.

I didn’t grow up wealthy. We couldn’t even afford spaghetti sauce when I was first born, but my mom and dad worked really hard and came from the bottom up.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

I refuse to be ashamed of the fact that my body does bleed each month; it is why we are all here.

Nobody knows why they were born or where they come from.