You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.

She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.

The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.

The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.

Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.

When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.