I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

Do you want me to call the internet police for you?

Good news is, we're annoying him. Bad news is, we're all going to die painfully.

In one of the scenes [in the Ordinary World], you can see a little cameo of my son, who's in the party. You've just gotta bring it all back home.

The man who commits immorality does so because he thinks it will maximize pleasure if he can minimize the pain by keeping it secret.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

He stepped forward and punched Dorian in the face, hard enough that I heard a thwack. "Ow," moaned Dorian, wincing from the pain. "My greatest asset.

Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye've been left to fight alone.

If you are worried about the risk to your reputation, you don't launch a telecoms firm in an aggressive way.