“Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields.”

“Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.”

“So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed…”

“Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life… I have put only my talent into my works.”

“The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.”

“The author of The Prophet not only has the good luck to have talent, he has also the talent to have good luck.”

“Momentum may be roughly described as quantity motion. A body moving at a speed of say twenty an hour, has a certain quantity of motion. If the body goes forty miles an hour there is twice as motion; or if twice as much matter goes twenty miles hour, there is also twice as much motion. Momentum is measured by the quantity of matter moving at a rate mass \times velocity.”

“Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.”

“Love is a quality, not a quantity.”

“As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed as ignorant as you were at twenty-two, you'd always be twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”