No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.

For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God's involvement in it.

I learned that sex was not a question of victory or defeat, of pleasure or profit: of a hand's manipulation and a physical response: I learned that in its purest pleasure it belongs to neither of those who practise it, in the same way as a child belongs to neither parent: it is a free spirit: it simply exists.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

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.

Be bold, but not too bold. Have courage, but not too much.