Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion

The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.

Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.