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.

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

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.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.

If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.

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