Too many dogs continue to be abused and abandond - one is too many - and people continue to kill people for money and envy and no reason at all. Bad people succeed and good people fail, but that's not the end of the story. Miracles happen that nobody sees, and among us walk heroes who are never recognised, and people live in loneliness because they cannot believe they are loved

I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.

I am the One, and I see all. But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.

If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap

This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.

Life's mysterious, strange, and full of wonders - and only a fool withdraws from it willingly and lets it pass him by.

Faced with the challenge of an endless universe, Man will be forced to mature further, just as the Neanderthal-faced with an entire planet-had no choice but to grow away from the tradition of savagery.