If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?.

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that….

Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out….

The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption; yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their….

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction..

Because a women's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it..

As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king's firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive ….

Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wr….

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphor….

I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world..

That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then….

Unbelief is a belief..

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us..

I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet,….

There seemed nothing to do but live..

I am not the we of anyone.

Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences..

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing..

We are not by nature cruel..

Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, i….

Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals..