The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.

There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.

People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.