“For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.”

“(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.”

“The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world co...”

“So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good?...”

“Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being ab...”

“Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation”

“The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.”

“A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses...”

“Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems to be their nature.- Yes; it's a funny habit.- No, it's not funny; you are wrong there. There's nothing funny in nature, howe...”

“Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together.”

“Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other's words and stories, we too easily oppose one another.”

“There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A good book tak...”