“Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.”

I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.

You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.

My hole is warm and full of light.

I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.

Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.

I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity. I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can.

In a word, growth and improvement can come through pain and conflict.

All of my books deal in a very rough, rude fashion with subjects about which there are great conflicts of opinion.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict.

All treaties between great states cease to be binding when they come in conflict with the struggle for existence.

Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.

All things come into being by conflict of opposites.