A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Things are not what they seem.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

I mean, my voice has gotten a little deeper sounding as I've gotten older, I think. I noticed that.

The moon I see now is the same moon I saw before. Except that before, when I looked at it, it was in anticipation of what it would be like when I got there. That's behind me now.

We can be the best taught people on the face of the earth but the trouble is we don't live as well as we have been taught.

If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room.

The West has given us the liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction.

nobody ever stops drinking until the cost of drinking becomes higher than the cost of not drinking.

Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money

I write to empty my mind and to fill my heart.

I grew up in the suburbs.

Fortune may raise up or abuse the ordinary mortal, but the sage and the soldier should have minds beyond her control.