After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.

One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought.

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.

By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.

You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.