I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.

My pessimism (which, by the way, is far from absolute) originated with my despair in the lack of perfection to be found in human nature. I was attempting in my successive books to show the inevitable handicap of the human condition.

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.

I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.

Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.

Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with a conscience; the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his endeavor is not only to tame the pig, but also to render it invisible.