Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair".... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.