It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.

The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

Death is just life's next big adventure.