This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.

The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks. But we can't all be physicists.

I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.