His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

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.