Are my characters copies of people in real life? ... Don't ever believe the stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do it. All the authors know that it can't be done.

There is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights.' No human rights can exist without property rights.

All work is an act of philosophy.

A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'