If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy

Sometimes we need a wise guide to peel back the ceiling of our lives to remind us that infinity never places any limits on our skies.

I think that in today's world, by nature, we are all self-centered. And that often leads to selfishness.

Retirement is not in my vocabulary. They aren't going to get rid of me that way.

The ocean is tired. It's throwing back at us what we're throwing in there.

we train for war and fight to win.

The desire for wealth is nearly universal, and none can say it is not laudable, provided the possessor of it accepts its responsibilities, and uses it as a friend to humanity.

I want to write the sort the book that my people want to read, even if the market is small.

A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.

It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.