Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.

The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.

...the program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week...If I as a human being were told that the standards by which animals are being measured in these experiments are human standards, I would be insulted.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption; yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves.

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.