Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongu... - Virginia Woolf

"Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent."

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."