There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.