True creativity often starts where language ends.

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which-miraculously, it seems-merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.

[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.

When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived

Nobody before the Pythagorean had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still blessed and cursed with their heritage. To non-European civilizations, the idea that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power, seems never to have occurred.

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

There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.