Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed

for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.

Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves. The shade climbed up the hills toward the top. On the sand banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray, sculptured stones.

Man has become our greatest hazard, and our only hope.

This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".

One day we'll sit and you'll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now - why, you can't find all the cards.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.