Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.

Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life's a fiction and the world's a lie, so put on some Creedence and let's get high.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it's too late.

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map.... A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it.