The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.

Envy has the ugliness of a trapped rat that has gnawed its own foot in its effort to escape.

The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they've been at other times.

People are able to live with only half a heart, to live without real compassion, because they are able to use words that are only forms.

I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common.

Life isn't just to be found, you have to work for it.

Once a Catholic always a Catholic.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

The roots of art and play lie very close together.

All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery, a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.

Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time.

There's an entire flight simulator hidden in every copy of Microsoft Excel 97.

Study: concentration of the mind on whatever will ultimately put something in your pocket.

It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless.

I have never known what to tell anybody. Except that it is better to do something than nothing, even if the cost is great.

I dimly guess, from blessings known, of greater out of sight.

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

It's true, I don't like the real world.

My mind to me an empire is.

It's not fair the emphasis put on beauty, or on sexuality.

Every seed has a story.