A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.

...when men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness on their eyes.

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

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

A poet sees things in two ways: First, as a child who never saw it before, and Second, as a dying man who will never see it again.

Writers turn dreams into print.