Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.

Papa's love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety.

That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.

Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.

What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge

The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of the human condition to be deeply unfaithful to constancy. I do believe that.

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.

Scientists do what writers do. They also live with an active interiority, only the ongoing speculation in their heads is about relations in the physical world rather than the psychological one.

You are the instrument of your own illumination.

What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.

Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness.

To do no evil is good, to intend none better.

I am happy to be alive.

We must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and new Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries

But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.

In all my eleven years of itinerant ministry I cannot recall any growing church which does not encourage small groups

Music will always find its way to us, with or without business, politics, religion, or any other bullshit attached.

Everything should be considered as a gift of God. When anything wrong comes to you and you think it is a gift, it won't stay with you. Do you know that? Try it sometime.

It makes me so much calmer when I’m responding to e-mails later.

I think Hellblazer is quite unique. In a comic world dominated by American characters (nothing wrong with that per se) Constantine was unashamedly British. A certain kind of miserablist British

If what we are doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it's probably not transformative enough