All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else

The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.

Swimming always cleans your soul

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.

Not that easy to have tears in your heart but a smile on your lips.

…secondhand bookstores have pilgrims. The words out of print are a call to arms for those who seek a Holy Grail made of paper and ink.

I had a sense of who I was before I got famous.

It is a precarious undertaking to say anything reliable about aims and intentions.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

Self-knowledge is only from moment to moment, and therefore there is a creative happiness from moment to moment.

without being sure of something, we can not begin to think about everything elses

Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.

The mind gives us thousands of ways to say no, but there's only one way to say yes, and that's from the heart.

We never can create a public sentiment strong enough to suppress the dram-shops until God's people take hold of the temperance reform as a part of their religion.