“An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.”

“Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.”

“The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.”

“I have know a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.”

“To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe.A piece of the universe?A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside of him is also inside of him.”

“Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.”