Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

I never asked to be born in the first place.

The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, bewildered am I.