Using the device of an imaginary world allows me in some strange way to go to the central issues - it's one of many ways to express feelings about real people, about real human relationships.

If life is a loom, the pattern you weave is not so easily unraveled.

How easy it is to think well of ourselves. Until the moment is upon us, we can never be certain.

After seven years of writing - and working many jobs to support my family - I finally got published.

I loved all the world's mythologies.

Count the deed, not the thought.

You must know nothing before you can learn something, and be empty before you can be filled. Is not the emptiness of the bowl what makes it useful? As for laws, a parrot can repeat them word for word. Their spirit is something else again. As for governing, one must first be lowest before being highest.