All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That's why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.

Before we are citizens, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty.

Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.

The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending-the sad ending is sometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually the unsatisfying ending.

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.

Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited.