One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.

One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]