Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

Good advice is rarer than rubies.

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.

Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.