Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, you're doing something.
Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.
Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
Because, she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.’
Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!
I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.
If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.
There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.