As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.

A mountain you're plannin' on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty.

Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.

As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.

Maybe then you comprehend, speaking one language only is a prison!

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.