Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself.

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

As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.