When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

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.

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.

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.