It's a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them--and they simply don't need you. That's all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they'll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on--this desperate need--and only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other.

It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.

If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.

That's a sure way to tell about somebody--the way they play, or don't play, make-believe.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.