“There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.”

“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”

“Memory is like glass. A person who has died is still visible, very close. But we can no longer contact each other. Death is mute; it excludes conversations, only allows silence.”

“Few conversations, at any time of life, are more stimulating, more spontaneous and more genuinely original than those long ridiculous talks we all have, when we are very young, late at night about the meaning of life.”

“Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets just like love or liquor.”

“Very few people actually want to understand something they want results.”