There's no such thing as effortless beauty - you should know that. There's no effort which is not beautiful - lifting a heavy stone or loving you. Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?

The people who decided in their wisdom that we're all going to go over to ebooks, they are not readers. These are technical people. These are people who think that somehow this is progress. It isn't. It's regressive.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was.

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur.