Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

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

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.

Much arrogance is necessary equipment for an artist, I think. Not sufficient, but necessary. It carries one across the gaps.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!

Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.