I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

Cats will amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw.

It takes a real man to make a true confession-a Chocolate Soldier will excuse or cloak his sin.

I bet you’re not dangerous at all, are you? Are you, you great ugly brute?

We must make the invisible kingdom visible in our midst.

I didn't like the distance between my family and myself that I was experiencing from having to work all the time.

When a book is just a plot, you know, two men fight for the love of a woman in a wild frontier, I immediately ask, 'Why?'

You kill people you hate or you kill in rage or you kill to get even, but you don't kill someone you're indifferent to.

When I go in there, I'm not going in there to win. I'm going in there to fight!