Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.

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

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.

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.

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.

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.