“It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.”

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

“Some lessons you learned by the book. Others you learned from cold hard experience. The latter may not be the best way to learn, but it damn well stuck.”

“Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.”

“The first rule of learning philosophy is to ban the hypothesis of knowing anything. You must go beyond your own opinions.”

“Pay attention to what's happening around you. Read the book before you see the movie. Remember, though you, alone, are responsible for your own happiness, its still okay to feel responsible for someone else's. Liveto learn.”

“I learned that you can't truly own anything, that true ownership comes only in the moment of giving.”

“If in your own experience you haven't yet learned the truth of the deception of feelings, then you just have to go on believing and thinking, having faith in the past and hope in the future, being happy today and unhappy tomorrow, but never being in command of your own life for long.”

“Learn Everything that is Good from Others, but bring it in, and in your own way absorb it; do not become others.”

“You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.”