Does everything always have to mean something else?" I ask before we get started. Who knew that literature was so tangled and complicated? "That is a wonderful lesson, Sang Ly. Remember it." "What was it again?" I ask, not certain to what she was referring. She repeats it for me. "In literature, everything means something.

But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shallow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naivete, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really "final" truth that, when carried to extremes, opposites meet.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

You see things as they are and ask, 'Why' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not'

Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is.

Man is more than merely an animal to exist and propagate his species. His mind gives him capacity to search out the great truths in God's arrangement and this lifts him far above the other animal creation.

People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.

It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.

As long as the world continues to be strange and interesting, I still want to take pictures of it.

To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.

None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things.