"Whatever life takes away from you, let it go. When you surrender and let go of the past, you allow yourself to be fully alive in the moment. Letting go of the past means you can enjoy the dream that is happening right now."

"The worst thing to call someone is crazy. It’s dismissive. I don’t understand this person, so they’re crazy. That’s bullshit, because people are not crazy. They’re strong people. Maybe their environment is a little sick."

"The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be."

"A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns."

"Doesn’t it feel much better, uh huh, when you’ve had a better day than yesterday?"

"We all come to the novelist as slaves stand before an emperor. He can free us with a word. Through him we can abandon our former lot and know what it is to be a general, a weaver, a singer, a country gentleman, to live in the village, to gamble, to hunt, to hate, to love, to go soldiering. Through him we are Napoleon, Savonarola, a peasant—stranger yet, an existence we might never have experienced, we are ourselves. He lends a voice to the mob, to solitude, to the old churchman, to the sculptor, to the child, to the horse, to the soul within us. Through him, we become the true Proteus who puts on all forms of life in succession. Exchanging them this, one for another, we feel that to our being, grown so agile and so strong, these forms of life are only a game, a mask that grieves or grins, but which is never quite real. Our good or bad fortune momentarily loses its tyrannical hold on us, we play with it and with that of others. This is why we feel such happiness when we reach the end of some beautiful novel with a tragic theme."