Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.

Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.

One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.