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

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

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

Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose.

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

It is a dangerous thing to have instant access to your emotions.

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

Everything we do has consequences.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Religion, you can’t a handle on it, you just have to know or not know-people either believe or they don’t believe.

Television’s Mr. Filth: that’s me.

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.

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

People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses.

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.

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

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.

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

Metaphor is embodied in language.