The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.

If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.

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

I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.

Progress means nothing to presence.

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.