“What is life without incompatible realities?”

Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.

You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.

To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘