We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

Progress means nothing to presence.

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.