Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

Those who, murmuring against it, do not follow my doctrine, deluded in all knowledge, you must know they are lost, the fools.

To worship rightly is to love each other, each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

He who carves the Buddha never worships him.

There must be some great truth underlying the instinct for worship.

Worship is transcendent wonder.

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

All books are either dreams or swords, You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

Writers should be read-but neither seen nor heard.

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Many infidels have maintained that Ignorance is the mother of Devotion.

Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.

Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.

The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.

The history of catastrophe requires such a literature to hold a broken mirror up to broken nature.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

A writer should have another lifetime to see whether he is appreciated.

It is Sunday, mid-morning-Sunday in the living room, Sunday in the kitchen, Sunday in the woodshed, Sunday down the road in the village: I hear the bells, calling me to share God's grace.

I have never thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics.

An African writer who really wants to interpret the African scene has to write in three dimensions at once. There is the private life, the social life, and what you may call the supernatural.