“Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?”

“Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.”

“If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.”

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

“There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself.”

“Your calling isn’t something that somebody can tell you about. It’s what you feel. It is the thing that gives you juice. The thing that you are supposed to do. And nobody can tell you what that is. You know it inside yourself.”

“Why do you do these things to yourself? Not just what you did to the window, but the way you talked to Clary. What are you punishing yourself for? You can't help how you feel.”

“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.”

“Goddamn it, do it yourself. You’re five hundred years old and you can’t use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot?”

“But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.”