"All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write."

"He said slowly, “You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do."

"I have more enemies than I deserve,' I said. 'I am fighting a losing battle, me against the world. The next century is at stake. Time is running out and my optimism is sorely strained.'Yeah?' he said. 'I was young once too."

"Lettie shrugged. “Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody."

"My thoughts and imaginations are little seeds. I want them to grow tall and strong like a tree. I plant them in the soil of paper and let them grow to shade and support the world with beauty, love, joy."

"There is no night porter wandering about in King's. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil."

"When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be prod."