I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.

Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.

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

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.

Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.

Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.