Imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. [Margaret Thatcher] takes away the nourishment of the nation.

In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.