The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.

The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination.

Therapy, as opposed to analysis, is a whole construct of myth, beautiful and creative.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.

God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names.

To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there.

You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.

As adults, we do know more, but we don't know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous.

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

Everything we do has consequences.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

I have been aware, from the age of 6, that I had talent.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

I was given talent, and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it.