All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery, a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.

Envy has the ugliness of a trapped rat that has gnawed its own foot in its effort to escape.

The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.

The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they've been at other times.

People are able to live with only half a heart, to live without real compassion, because they are able to use words that are only forms.

I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common.

Life isn't just to be found, you have to work for it.

Once a Catholic always a Catholic.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

The roots of art and play lie very close together.

Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time.

It is wrong to kill anyone. It is wrong to kill those who kill. It is wrong to kill the executioner. The laws on murder must be killed!

There is possibility of making you suffer even and pain. There is a way!

Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.

Yoga is the study of the functioning of the body, the mind and the intellect in the process of attaining freedom.

Controversy is always a beautiful thing. I love controversy and I try to fan it as much as I can without having my husband's head pop off!

The more I see and know about life, the more ideas I have and the more I want to make art.

Imperceptibly, more time passes when I'm not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, re-imagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.

Either sin is with you, lying on your shoulders, or it is lying on Christ, the Lamb of God.

There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle

Sometimes, I think Bill forgets that I am sixteen. But I am very happy that he does.