“Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.”

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it’s going to be told.

You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say.

Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.

The good thing about masturbation is that you don’t have to get dressed up for it.

The better the actor, the more stupid he is.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?

The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.

Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.

It’s a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

I can see every monster as they come in.

Reading dreams. That’s what started her walking down the road. Every day she’d walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.

Great fury, like great whisky, requires long fermentation.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as in their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.