“I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you’re ground down by convention. You can’t think as you like and you can’t act as you like. That’s because it’s a democratic nation. I expect America’s worse.”

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan’t make the mistakes I’ve made.

I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life. There’s only one thing like it, when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you.

The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?

If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.

You’re intoxicated by the boundless space.

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.

The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care?

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly?

The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

I usually do one con a year as a GoH and try to make the World Fantasy Convention for business purposes.

The Buddha’s insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment.

After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquility of a political convention.

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

Fog and hypocrisy – that is to say, shadow, convention, decency – these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

Poetry is a very complex art, It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.