My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

Literature is the voice of the human heart.

People die when curiosity goes.

I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying 'You're mad, you're mad.'

I share my name with an aerobatic bird that can whiz across a whole summer sky in seconds. A swift is so equipped for speed that it can scarcely cope with being stationary.

And the Light shineth in darkness

From the cradle to the grave, all I want is you.

People seem to overlook an old man losing his mind if he occasionally made light of it.

(...) I'm not much of anything, (...) besides bored and boring, punctuated by fits of scant self-amusement. And you are ...?

Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.

It is extremely important that mass media, having freed from the relics of the Cold War, served for peace and dialogue between nations and religions, the rich and the poor, countries and continents.

We may see the small value God has for riches, by the people he gives them to.

You want to know if anyone's going to go see your film. You shouldn't worry about it or get hung up on it. So yea, you kind of monitor it.

Only where there are graves are there resurrections.

Cease, man, to mourn, to weep, to wail; Enjoy thy shining hour of sun; We dance along Death's icy brink, But is the dance less full of fun?