Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

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.

If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.

Grounded by healthy self-esteem and personal self-worth, this admirable character quality can inspire awe and reverence.

You're not me. You can't feel like I feel.""I can feel.""No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine.""It's not fine. It's just not so bad.

Don't aspire to make a living, aspire to make a difference.

Inner freedom demands the rejection of any imposition that injures our dignity.

If we get too caught up in the rhetoric of meditation, we will miss the point. The point was to go beyond rhetoric.

I am an experimenter, or rather I used to be one. Then I stopped working, and since then people think I am a theoretician.

God existed before He made anything else, and He Himself was never made. God is eternal.

Only foolish people are completely secure.

Contentment is natural wealth.