"We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts."

"It is the ability to choose which makes us human."

"Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known."

"When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony."

"Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling."

"In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come."

"I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect."

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

"That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along."

"Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it."

"We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love."

"Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are."

"When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable."

"With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me."

"A book comes and says, "Write me." My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate."