Metaphor is embodied in language.

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

We should always look back on our own past with a sort of contempt, as long as the tenderness is there - but please let some of the contempt be there.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

Creation is filled with soul-sick folks, colored and white, never knowing where they belong. They tangle everybody else up in their grief.

When you start to notice the mystical, the mystical will start to notice you.

If you board the wrong train it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

Fly without wings; Dream with open eyes; See in darkness.

Sometimes in the heat of the battle you just got to calm down and use what you do in practice to avoid the penalties.

Believing in books is a lot like believing in God.

Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying, 'The walls of my room should be painted this color.

Those who do not read have no advantage over those who cannot read.

My shoes were on Oprah but they ran out of time so I wasn't on. I left my shoes in Chicago so they could put them on the show.

We must sow the seed, not hoard it.