And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.

It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.