
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.

I really was a fan of his and always have been - his writing especially, you know? I think people a lot of times overlook that part, because he kind of got into that party character so heavy.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

Child! Do not throw this book about; refrain from the unholy pleasure of cutting all the pictures out.

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.

Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.

Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.

Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.

When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

Anybody could say anything they want about me, and it literally never penetrates my skin.

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.

I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

Like pilgrims to the appointed place we tend; The world's an inn, and death the journey's end.