You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

Love must wait; it must break one’s bones.

Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they're ready to leave

Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.

I'm a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible.

I deem as heroic those who have the harder task, face it unflinchingly and live. In this world women do that.

Dresscodes are for styleless people.

Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.

What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish.

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.

The right path is characterised by rough road.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

The Bible is worth all the other books which have ever been printed.

I can't just react on the strength of an email and three pages of synopsis, and say I'm going to take off for three months of my life.

By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.

It is very easy to speak words of wisdom from a comfortable distance, when one sees no reality, no details, none of the effect on men's minds.

Every lover's lament has an element of boasting.

You can't learn pathos or profundity.

Being in Portland is cool. I have some good friends here and the general feeling might be a little more welcoming.

If true happiness depended on the thoughts of man, then all philosophers and deep thinkers would be filled to overflowing with it.