I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

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.

It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours

Be who you are

To find love, be loving first.

Touch has a memory. O say, love, say, What can I do to kill it and be free?

Everyone is born with some special talent.

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

There is no point in retaining a brand equity if it has no traction with consumers, or has no likelihood of doing so.

Better a tooth out than always aching.

Kings are for nations in their swaddling-clothes: France has attained her majority.

Only the poets can hold the country together, and I wanted to hold Germany together.