Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.

The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph

...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.