A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.

You shouldn't side-step suffering if you have to go through it to get where you're going.

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.

Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.

Two-thirds of my energies go in trying to save one-third for work.

we know that the Furies do not come uninvited.