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

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

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.

It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

One must work with time and not against it.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.