“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.”

When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.

You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge.

The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

The most valuable thing I have learned from life is to regret nothing.

As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of.

For my part I cannot believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in a God who has neither humour nor common sense.

Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

Life isn’t long enough for love and art.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don’t.

Sanity lies somewhere between the inhibitions of conventional morality and the looseness of extreme impulse, but the area in-between is very fuzzy.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

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.