“All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?”

Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.

“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.

People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.

A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.

I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.

Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.

That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.

Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.

I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.

It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.

As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?