I'm still very drawn to British women writers, especially Iris Murdoch and her impossible esoteric characters and the philosophical questions that they ask.

There’s something in her archness, not a tone I’d normally think to emulate, but there’s something delicious in it. Her people might be murdering and raping but really they’re thinking about what goodness is in the world, bizarre juxtapositions of that kind.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.

The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.

The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.

All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)

The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.