I think that friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

What I tell kids is don't get mad (about censorship) get even. Run, don't walk, to the first library you can find, and read what they're trying to keep out of your eyes. Read what they're trying to keep out of your brains. Because that's exactly what you need to know.

and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.

Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it...I have written because it fulfilled me. ... I did it for the pure joy of the things. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.

He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially--not in a sugary way but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake.

Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.