I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.

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.

Inner joy enables you to choose to look beyond your pain and make your praise a sacrifice to God.

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.

Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Cheerfulness ought to be the viaticum vitae of their life to the old; age without cheerfulness is a Lapland winter without a sun.

The road to energy independence, economic recovery, and greenhouse gas reductions runs through the building sector.

I don't turn my nose up at anything. If it's a great part, it's a great part. I'd love to do a box-office hit.

Definiteness of purpose with positive mental attitude is the starting point of all worthwhile achievement.

If you can make the song a soundtrack to what you're living at the time, I think that's the most important part of a song.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind.