And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

Literature is the voice of the human heart.

People die when curiosity goes.

I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying 'You're mad, you're mad.'

I share my name with an aerobatic bird that can whiz across a whole summer sky in seconds. A swift is so equipped for speed that it can scarcely cope with being stationary.

I had never seen the end of day and the beginning of the night greet each other. We were caught in the loveliness between the two. A House Like a Lotus

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

We of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war

What invariably distinguishes a good player from a poor one is their respective address positions or setups.

The thought of how far the human race would have advanced without government simply staggers the imagination.

All I know to do is to light the candle that has been given to me.

You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library. She pointed to the shelf opposite. Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

There's no such thing as the very best. If you're doing your best, it's only because you haven't yet found a way to do better.

You have my word. If you return with me, you won't be harmed. I'd die first.