That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.

I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.

The machine conceals the machinations.

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.