There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

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.

Tim and Raine are coming in.""Are they insane?""Apparently.

That sad sinking feeling you get when you don't fit in even with other autistics

There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.

When we do what is right, we have contentment, peace and happiness.

The exceptionalism of a black U.S. President is not important to me. It's what he does - and who he has at the table.

It's easy to do anything in victory. It's in defeat that a man reveals himself.

It's a hard process to navigate... to figure out where your kid ought to go to college.

Anyone who's lived their life to the fullest extent has a scandal buried somewhere.

As you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested god, becomes increasingly implausible.