Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.

One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.

Untrained minds have always been a nuisance to the military police of orthodoxy. God-intoxicated mystics and untidy saints with only a white blaze of divine love where their minds should have been, are perpetually creating almost as much disorder within the law as outside it.

The very thing about people that makes the human race interesting is also the thing that makes it so hard to get anything done without the most horrible confusions: no two people think exactly the same way about anything.

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.

I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do - the really gifted don't need advice and the others can't take it.