There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.