It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

This life we live nowadays. It's not life, it's stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.

The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.