It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.
It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Time is how you spend your love.
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Faith, faith, faith in ourselves, faith, faith in God, this is the secret of greatness. If you have faith in all the three hundred and thirty millions of your mythological Gods, and in all the Gods which foreigners have now and again introduced into your midst, and still have no faith in yourselves, there is no salvation for you.
A lot of actors are perfectionists, besides merely being egotists.
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
For the Order wishes to be secret and to work in silence; for thus it is better secured from the oppression of the ruling powers, and because this secrecy gives a greater zest to the whole.