Animals form an inalienable fragment of nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we diminish our world and our place in it.

The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

We risk great peril if we kill off this spirit of adventure, for we cannot predict how and in what seemingly unrelated fields it will manifest itself. A nation that loses its forward thrust is in danger, and one of the most effective ways to retain that thrust is to keep exploring possibilities. The sense of exploration is intimately bound up with human resolve, and for a nation to believe that it is still committed to a forward motion is to ensure its continuance.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.

I never wrote anything that was published until I was forty.