Letting everyone down would be my greatest unhappiness.
Books of quotations. . . afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.
I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.
to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. . . . the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.
I don't believe in right-angled turning points.
No one. . . can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.
I had a lot of chaos in my very early years before I was old enough to know what was going on, and then I just skated through the rest of my childhood without dealing with it.
If you wish to behold God, you may see Him in every object around; search in your breast, and you will find Him there. And if you do not yet perceive where He dwells, confute me, if you can, and say where He is not.