After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.

Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I write about real people in disguise. If anything, my characters are toned down-the truth is much more bizarre.

Jackie Collins

It is another's fault if he be ungrateful, but it is mine if I do not give. To find one thankful man, I will oblige a great many that are not so.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

Mark Strand

Most authors steal their works, or buy.

Alexander Pope

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Aretha Franklin

You never know how short a month is until you pay alimony.

John Barrymore

It's a weird sensation to be mad and learning at the same time.

Jeff Foxworthy

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

Benjamin Franklin

At some point, I would like to write a book and other things, but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.

Alanis Morissette

Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.

Terry Pratchett

There's only one growth strategy: work hard.

William Hague