Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.

Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.

No one should be allowed to give back the gift of life, unless they are very old and full of tears, when the body outlives the spirit, when they should be allowed to join the others who've already gone.

Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.