As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.

I have a longing for fiction - to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

For me, personally, it is very important that the days are exactly the same, so I have routines. I do the same thing every day.

Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.

I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

Shame tells you when you've gone too far. Then you try if it's okay to go too far. And it might be so that shame was right. You can never, never know that.

As a person, I'm polite - I want to please.

If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music.

Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have.

Honestly, I don’t know what I would recommend from this story. Perhaps it is this: if you have the choice to laugh or do nothing, you might as well laugh.

With positive attitude, you can graciously overcome every adversity.

I found the prospect daunting, but somehow comforting, too, because the counselors insisted it could be done, and, after all, many of them were recovering alcoholics themselves.

A single word has sometimes lost or won an empire.

What does a mirror look at?

The reason a person is in a particular state of mind is primarily because of attraction and aversion. Attraction and aversion cause us to format a mental or intellectual program.

No man can lose what he never had.

I have no use for men who fail. The cause of their failure is no business of mine, but I want successful men as my associates.

I have never really thought of him as a person, either.... A guy whose strings were broken, who didn’t feel the root of his leaves of grass connected to the field, a guy who was cracked. Like me.