I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

There is nothing frightening in the dark if you just face it.

There was something scary about watching adults sleep. It was as if no one at all were in charge of the world.

Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally — and sometimes maddeningly — who we are.

Every religion emphasizes human improvement, love, respect for others, sharing other people's suffering. On these lines every religion had more or less the same viewpoint and the same goal.

If I don't eat right when I wake up, I die.

You may be gone but you're never over.

You really have to learn what you're good at and what you're not good at, what you can handle and what you can't handle. We have a tendency to forget it.

Because all bad little vampires see me in the end

The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.

A drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.