We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.

There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.

The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams

People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.