My chauffer once told me that I would feel better in the morning, but when I woke up the two of us were still on a tiny island surrounded by man-eating crocodiles, and, as I'm sure you can understand, I didn't feel any better about it.

Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.

If you enjoy books with happy endings than you are better off reading some other book.

Oftentimes. when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps.

Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record.

It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes, it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.

Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.