Truth is a matter of the imagination.

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.

Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.