There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.

The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.

Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit.