The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

As a writer, you are free.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

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

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

Progress means nothing to presence.

...fiction is made out of the writer's experience, his whole life from infancy on, everything he's thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn't something you go and get - it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience"; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing.