It is always hard to believe that the will to change something does not produce an immediate change.

I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.

I feel like everybody knows the world isn't the happiest, most peaceful place. And though everybody has an idea of what's wrong, we're not changing it for the better.

I demand my right to a private life, just as I respect that right for everybody else.

By reacting to aggression with aggression we lose the opportunity to spiritually benefit from the experience.

I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

So I'm studying ballet every day and really training so people will see me as a ballet dancer, which no one's seen before.

Batista does look pretty mad.

It is because of his brain that he [modern man] has risen above the animals. Guess which animals he has risen above.

We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.