I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

He knows my limitations and where I’m a good wife and a good mom.

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

I break ground. I trailblaze.

The first wealth is health.

I restore myself when I’m alone.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

I have a slight bit of OCD, I think. I’m not walking around flipping light switches. But when I say I’m going to do something, I have to do it.

When a father puts in long hours at work, he’s praised for being dedicated and ambitious. But when a mother stays late at the office, she’s sometimes accused of being selfish, neglecting her kids.

Begin with the end in mind.

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

Going to a therapist is not something you do when you’re growing up as a street kid in Toronto.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out.

I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness. I like to say it’s like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us to live this way.

I’ve never lived my life in the opinion of others. I believe I’m a good person. I believe I’m a good mom. But that’s for my kids to decide, not for the world.

I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.

Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.

Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

You can’t hire someone to practice for you.

I’m not afraid to make mistakes.

The greatest remedy for anger is delay.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

When I was four, my mother insisted I get out of the car and find my own way home. Although I got lost, I did find my way home. It taught me the value of independence at an early age.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don’t know how to manage it.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

‚Your Erroneous Zones’ was the book that went over the top simply because I believed in it so much.

And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I’d go back to Virginia.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.

I write all my sermons.

If your treat an individual… as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.

I never do anything that I don’t want to do.

Practice yourself, for heaven’s sake in little things, and then proceed to greater.

Modesty is not only an ornament, but also a guard to virtue.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

I have no time to think about other writers. I am too busy with my own problems.