What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.