The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.

Women have seen that they have locked themselves up with feminist writing.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.

We're swallowed up only when we are willing for it to happen.

It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.

The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.

Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium.

It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

There is a simplicity to war. Attacking is the only secret. Dare- and the world yields. How quickly they forget that all it takes to change the course of history... is the will of a single man.

Without love what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.

If we cannot come together to pause, to respect our dead and the heroic lives of meaning they led, then ours is truly a civilization lost.

The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.

An economist's definition of hatred is the willingness to pay a price to inflict harm on others.

Your father is angry with me because he thinks I almost got myself killed,' said Sabriel, with a slight grin. 'I don't understand it myself, since I think he should be glad that I didn't.

MOST LIES succeed because no one goes through the work to figure out how to catch them.

Play is as necessary to the perfect development of a child as sunshine is to the perfect development of a plant.

Now at 47, 48 I am expected to do ten times better work that I did when I was 24.

Leadership is like parenting.