I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.

If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don't know how long, though. It's not your choice.

It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.

When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.

When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.

This thing about looking for someone less different... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.

There's nothing you can't fuck up if you try hard enough.

The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.

So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.

What really matters is what you like, not what you are like

You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.

When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.

The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.

You can't just let nature run wild.

I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.