One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

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.

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

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

When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.

Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.