“I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That’s so many pages longhand.”

There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.

There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.

His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.

Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.

It may be — I hope it is — redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.

This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.

The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.

And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.

He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.

One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it’s the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.

The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.

If I’d gone straight to the NBA, I don’t think I would have been ready as a player or a person.

I have been so long master that I would be master still, or at least that none other should be master of me.

I was just a big fan of tattoos always growing up, and I wanted something cool that symbolizes what I’ve been through in my life, and everything on my chest and my back is like a collage.

My wrists are crooked and don’t go all the way back. I’ve been practicing and working on them. You can’t do everything good.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.