If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

When we pull back and get, for a moment, the 'bird's eye' view of life, it reveals meanings that are ungraspable by the narrow focus of our usual worm's eye view

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.

The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.

It struck me that the popularity of Christmas is a matter of web-like consciousness. Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach, with its memories of Dickens and Irving's Bracebridge Hall.