"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."

"If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine."

"I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is." (Paper Towns)

He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

"I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

"Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow."

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

"What's past is prologue." (The Tempest)

"There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live." (The Count of Monte Cristo)

 "A word after a word after a word is power."

"You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterward in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come."

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it." (Diggers)

"I try to say one thing with my work: A book is a wonderful place to be. A book is a package, a gift package, a surprise package -- and within the wrappings is a whole new world and beyond."

“We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things…”

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing." (The Kindly Ones)

"The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven." (Xenocide)

"For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are."

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."