Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul..

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read..

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are..

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst..

If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly ….

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion..

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that somet….

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make o….

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look..

In love there are two things - bodies and words..

I never change, I simply become more myself..

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality..

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat..

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!.

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love..

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor..

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity..

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of ….

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole..

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in….

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions..