People aren’t quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They’re not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for...

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and...

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.

The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.

Screenplays I didn’t really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

Broad tolerance in the matter of beliefs is necessarily a part of the new ethics.

I don’t think it’s any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found – indeed...

But what is after all the happiness of mere power? There is a greater happiness possible than to be lord of heaven and earth; that is the happiness of being truly loved.

The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.