“What else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.”

“For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.”

“Instead, we'd do what we always did, the only thing we'd ever been dependably stellar at: we'd read.”

“This is what growing old is. We think we will learn sanskrit, learn Greek. Instead, what we learn is more than we ever wanted to learn about things we wish we'd never heard of.”

“Learning was of two kinds: the one being the things we learned and knew, and the other being the training that taught us how to find out what we did not know?”

“We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.”