“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.

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.

I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.

If I could read a book, I’d definitely read one of yours.

To hone my voice, I read everything, from books to cereal boxes, three times: once for fun, the second time to learn something new about the writing craft, and the third time was to improve that piece.

For the first time i began to think, consciously and deliberately of religion and other worlds. The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation; not the ritual or ceremonial part, but it’s great books, the “Upnishads,” and the “Bhagavad Gita.”

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

I believe the Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man. All the good from The Savior of the world is communicated to us through this Book.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.