The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.

Death and what came after death was no great mystery to Sabriel. She just wished it was.

Every time anybody in Washington talks about legal status, amnesty, anything of that nature, it becomes a magnet that lures people in quickly into the United States.

Someday a loving Hand will be laid upon our shoulder and this brief message will be given: "Come home.

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?

To avoid the trap of the Pharisees, we've got to guard the interconnection between our thoughts and our attitudes.

Shirley Valentine is a beautiful character and so well written. What Shirley speaks and thinks is so logical

Country music has always sort of been country music.

I like the feeling that I'm giving young women self-confidence. It sounds so cliched, but it can be very moving.

I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.

A college education should equip one to entertain three things: a friend, an idea and oneself.