There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more.

Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

Death is the room that is always empty.

The more abhorrent a news item the more comforting it was to be the recipient, since the fact that it had happened elsewhere proved that it had not happened here, was not happening here, and would therefore never happen here.