Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

I have always disliked the morning, it is too responsible a time, with the daylight demanding that it be 'faced' and (usually when I wake for I wake late) with the sun already up and in charge of the world, with little hope of anyone usurping or challenging its authority. A shot of light in the face of a poor waking human being and another slave limps wounded into the light-occupied territory.

I don't wish to inhabit the human world under false pretences.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it was more convenient to leave the basin on his head. Stray thoughts were trimmed along with stray hair; brain-vines, tentacles of thought, were not encouraged to wander. Then, in the interests of human economy, the head of adaptable man became a basin of uniform shape—a basin, a crash helmet. Safe at last; no more thought-cuts.

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.