Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur.

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off.

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.

Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.