... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.

This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

I will tell you what I have learned myself. For me, a long five or six mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day.

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.

We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.

A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned.

If you are not using your mind for self-torture, why would you think of peace?

It is such a secret place, the land of tears.

Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.

ONE MUST BE COMPASSIONATE TO ONE'S SELF BEFORE EXTERNAL COMPASSION.

It's like hip hop all over again, back in the '70s back in the Bronx, when it was just bubbling. But it's going to be huge.

Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation.

I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.

It's hard to make a book episodic.

God always punishes us for what we can't imagine.