A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too; Each different path brings other ends in view

You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons...This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.

Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture

The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.