One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I'm writing and think, "I've been working for two hours," I've actually been working for seven.

We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed.

Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.

Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets...My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.

Nobody ever recognizes themselves unless they are not the character. There are many people who have claimed to be in my books, but unfortunately they were usually people that I didn't know.