laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.

It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. - from the introduction of the 1986 Norton edition

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs