For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

If we all discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to tell them that they loved them.

We didn't name Birdie before she was born. When she came out I said, 'I think we gotta go with Birdie, I think that's her name.'

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

What the world, social and political, concrete and mental, really needs is not new things, but the old things made new.

Flames from the lips may be produced by holding in the mouth a sponge saturated with the purest gasoline.

Perhaps they needn't even believe - it was enough that they needed angels, and the angels would return gladly.

When you are with a landscape or a human being where there is no need to speak, but simply to listen, to perceive, to feel.

Some of my most special shooting experiences have been at weekends.

Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.