“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.”

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

I think most people are more important than their opinions.

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.

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

I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating.

On a clear day, rise and look around you, and you’ll see who you are.

He deeper and more staggering can be his collapse. There is never a day in any man’s life but that he is dependent upon the grace of God for power and the blood of Jesus for cleansing.

I’m always afraid someone’s going to tap me on the shoulder one day and say, ‘Back to North London’.

One day you meet someone and for some inexplicable reason, you feel more connected to this stranger than anyone else.

Review your goals twice every day in order to be focused on achieving them.

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

You don’t wake up one day and discover you’re a lawyer any more than you wake up as a pro football player. It takes time.