I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money.

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.

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

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.

The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.