"The people who know the sort of personality or persona that I give across more on Twitter just realize that I'm just being messy and I'm just snatching wigs."

“God be thanked for the thinkers of good and noble thoughts! It wakes up all the best in ourselves, to come into close contact with others greater and better in every way than we are.”

“I have dipped into Ian McEwan and so on. I tend not to stick with one writer. But I dip in here and there.”

“I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It's not the final thing, it's the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite.”

Source : "An Interview with M. H. Abrams by Sharon Hamilton". People's Education, March 10, 2007.

“I have never killed anybody, it is true, but it is because I lacked the courage or the time, not because I lacked the desire”

“It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.”

“Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.”

“There is a built-in mechanism by which we respond fairly strongly and fairly negatively to somebody who is being negative or to somebody who is simply disagreeing with us, in which case it's a very unhappy position for our brain to be in. Our brain does not want us to be wrong. Because that has very dire consequences in terms of our overall survival.”

Source : Interview with Rahasya Poe, lotusguide.com. September 1, 2010.

“Each book first begins with a little idea.”