You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life.

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?

Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.