“If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others”

“We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.”

“They don't go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? If lewdies are good that's because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. And I was patronizing the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of the brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?”

“Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”

“If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.”

“You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.”

“If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.”