"We are an impossibility in an impossible universe."

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."

"Those who dona€?t build must burn. Ita€?s as old as history and juvenile delinquence."

"I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane."

"We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

"I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it."

"About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment."

"Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try."

"Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."

"This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what youa€?re doing, or it comes out flat. You cana€?t fake your way through this."

"If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul."