The machine conceals the machinations.

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.

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.