“Please write an ending where the Martians are defeated. Don't take away your readers' hope.”

“It might even teach Murray that while finding true love was one of the most wonderful things that could happen to you in life, finding a friend was equally splendid.”

“Man needed to dream. Yes, he needed to believe in illusions, to aspire to something more than the miserable, hostile life that suffocated him.”

“Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?”

“But first you have to fight, to try other ways. If your life displeases you, my lad, try to change it. Don't give in to defeat so easily. Death is the only sure defeat. It is the end of everything.”

“For if you succeed in making this girl laugh, if you make her laughter ring in the air like a fountain of silver coins cascading to the floor, you will win her heart forever.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great...”

“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cove...”

“What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and live out.”

“There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race o...”

“Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesn't prevent it being reality itself...”

“I guess in this culture of ever-shortening attention spans, it's good if a song can lift us out of the madness, even if only for a few minutes.”