I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.