How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.

The real fear isn't rejection, but that there won't be enough time in your life to write all the stories that you have in you.

The first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.

Day, after day, after glorious day, I was falling in love with books.

The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. [...] The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.