You can make yourself happy or miserable - it's the same amount of effort.

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

I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person.

You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.

Forgive, I hope you won't be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up and see you behind your desk, so near but far away, and, how can I say this, I used to think that you were Mrs. God, and that the library was a whole world, and that no matter what part of the world or what people or thing I wanted to see and read, you'd find and give it to me.

The important thing of any time you live in is to be in love yourself. You float above your time then. It's what you want that counts, not what your time wants.