If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.

Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.

There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.