I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.

I don't remember lighting this cigarette and I don't remember if I'm here alone or waiting for someone.

How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?

Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people - if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art - this craft - he must first have been given some hope.

The writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience.

I have the legacy of my father and his nocturnal automatic waking up. But I like those periods. I immediately have a different vision of humanity and my life.

People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.

As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them

My home is attached to a study - in fact, my home is my study, and I have a little room to sleep in. I need to write looking onto the street or a landscape. Looking at reality from some distance gives me romantic visions.

After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy.

I don't look at emails, Internet or newspapers before 1 P.M. I wake at 7 A.M., eat fruit, drink tea or coffee, and read what I've achieved, or not achieved, the previous day. Then I take a shower and work on my next sentence until 1 P.M. After I've done emails and so on, I write again from 3 P.M. until 8 P.M.; then I socialise.

My unhappiness protects me from life.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

I would be pleased if someone would invent a pill to remove my impatience, moodiness, and occasional bursts of anger. But if they did, I wouldn't be able to write my novels or paint.

Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it.