“How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?”

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?

Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.

the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.

One’s intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.

I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.

Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?

Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.

We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.

We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.

As an absolute right something few other inhabitants can expect as a special privilege – then the result is likely to be spontaneous outbreaks of anti-Semitism.

I must say, I never expected to see the day where I would be talking about anything other than reducing the debt, I’m running into the tyranny of zero, which is where you can’t reduce (the debt) any more

How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?

The precise place where you would expect to see the least.

The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.