I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face.

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death