We are never prepared for what we expect.

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

Many people who want to be writers don't really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

I would suppose I learned how to write when I was very young indeed. When I read a child's book about the Trojan War and decided that the Greeks were really a bunch of frauds with their tricky horses and the terrible things they did, stealing one another's wives, and so on, so at that very early age, I re-wrote the ending of the Iliad so that the Trojans won. And boy, Achilles and Ajax got what they wanted, believe me. And thereafter, at frequent intervals, I would write something. It was really quite extraordinary. Never of very high merit, but the daringness of it was.

On 24 October 1944 Planet Earth was following its orbit about the sun as it has obediently done for nearly five billion years.

We should be most careful about retreating from the specific challenge of our age. We should be reluctant to turn our back upon the frontier of this epoch... We cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand slow march of our intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities.