A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.

...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.

If you don't like someone's story, write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, say what it is you don't like.

What a man does not know is greater than he.

You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.

Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly for ever.

Art is created to make us, to make our passage through the world better, fruitful - and I would say that every story in the end, if it is good, tells us something. This is actually what I meant when I said a novelist is a teacher. Which is why I am constantly dealing with "didactic". Now a teacher in the sense I use it is not somebody who has the profession of standing in front of children, with a piece of chalk in his hand scribbling on the blackboard. That is not the teacher I have in mind. The teacher I have in mind is something less tangible.