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.

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.

What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.

My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.