“Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiti...”

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”

“Where music thundered let the mind be still,Where the will triumphed let there be no will,What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.”

“For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.”

“I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.”

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.”

“I wandered in the streets, what with the noise the people made, the number of the coaches, the running of the footmen, the swaggering of great courtiers, and the thrusting aside of everybody, many ...”

“I do feel that Ive managed to make something I could maybe call my worldover timelittle by little. And when Im inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to ...”

“The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat in...”

“The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devicesafter a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.”

“The cold rationalism simply covers for raw, wounded emotion. The more driven people are by the mind, the more they feel and further encode their feelings. The thickness of the tarpaulin cover is as...”

“Anything we fully do is an alone journey.”

“To write is to stand at the edge of a bottomless well, unafraid of falling in.”

“But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or no...”

“So here I am writing my zombie story and my lead character decides to betray me.”