I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.

When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

Only knowledge and truth may result in freedom of mind.

We seldom look up to the person

The gate is small because truth guards the entrance. The way is narrow because the Lord protects us with wise boundaries.

You create your luck by being healthy and not regretting the past or being anxious about the future.

People mistake their limitations for high standards.

The odour of Burgundy, and the smell of French sauces, and the sight of clean napkins and long loaves, knocked as a very welcome visitor at the door of our inner man.

Watch with awe and amazement at how quickly an engineer will become totally annoyed by inefficiency.

Faith is the courage to face reality with hope.

A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.

Why should I tremble at the plough of my Lord, that maketh deep furrows on my soul? I know He is no idle husbandman, He purposeth a crop.