It is not simply that we share with each other a common humanity, but that individually we have no humanity without each other.

Another of the things I started to do during this time was what Buddhists normally call "meditation" or, in Christian terms, "contemplative prayer". It began to supersede deipnosophy as my favorite hobby.

If you tell people enough times that they are unhappy, incomplete, possibly insane and definitely selfish there is bound to come a grey morning when they wake up with the beginning of a nasty cold and wonder if they are lonely rather than simply “alone.”

Ian Watson did an almost full novel length treatment which I've never seen and when he finished it Stanley said to him. I need somebody to smear this with vaginal jelly, and I have to say when I first heard this that I was rather shocked, because he was quite gentlemanly.

My father taught me to be independent and cocky and free thinking, but he could not stand it if I disagreed with him.

Gardening gave me a way to work with silence; not "in silence" but "with silence" - it was a silent creativity.

Art is an artificial organization of experience.