All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won’t remember it, and you’ll learn nothing from it, and you’ll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.

You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.

Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.

You can wait forever for the muse to sit on your shoulder, but most of the time you know what has to be done and inspiration is not going to help you.

It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.