And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn’t know where I was at all.
Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts – only in the truth.
Alone, no one wins freedom.
One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies...
There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.
The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.
Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.
Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.
The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
You cannot blame everything on the enemy.
What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin – the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin’s thinking.
I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer.
I do try to separate my personal activism – showing up at a demonstration or something – from what I write.
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.