Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you -- and other people -- any trouble.