Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.

Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.

Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.