The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.

they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.