I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common.

Envy has the ugliness of a trapped rat that has gnawed its own foot in its effort to escape.

The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.

The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they've been at other times.

People are able to live with only half a heart, to live without real compassion, because they are able to use words that are only forms.

Life isn't just to be found, you have to work for it.

Once a Catholic always a Catholic.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

The roots of art and play lie very close together.

All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery, a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.

Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time.

Younger colleagues tended to draw untested self-confidence from their bonuses and prestigious degrees.

That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.

My personal taste doesn't enter into it a lot when I make my decisions as to what to parody.

In the end, robots do things that people can do. So there is a cost above which you can hire somebody to do it, and that bounds the opportunity.

I am a player in life, not an observer. I look at herpes the way you look at a scraped knee.

Men aren't really complicated. They are very simple, literal creatures. They usually mean what they say. And we spend hours trying to analyze what they've said, when really it's obvious.

The Mill gets by going.

Forgive thyself little, and others much.

I support the world and love everybody. It's about spreading love and breaking down barriers, not building up hate.

Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are.