There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.