“He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.”

The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.

We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.

I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer – even as Wells thought about him – or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.

We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

Man’s memory shapes Its own Eden within.

You can’t measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.

I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining.

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.

Thoughts and words form your mental image. And since we become what we picture be sure your thoughts and words express prosperity and blessing rather than poverty and defeat.

I sing to the realists, people who accept it like it is. I express problems. There are tears when it’s sad and smiles when it’s happy. It seems simple to me, but for some people, I guess feelin’ takes courage.

Creating characters is just another way to express a type and put that type to use.

What I’m fighting for now in my work… for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times.