... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

What good is music? None ... and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.