“Plenty of clever children have to pretend to be not clever or else they get bullied by the thick.”

“I never read the scripts at all carefully and never wanted to know what was going on, because i felt that being a benevolent alien, that's the way it should be”

“It's time for bed. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get in bed, and I don't have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that's kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, it's very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine, twenty nights of sleeping, you've taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.***Some of the books are thick, and some are thin, some of the books are in hardcover and some in paperback. Sometimes they get rolled up with the pillows and the blankets. And I never make the bed. So it's like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. It's a Campbell's Chunky Soup of books. The bed you eat with a fork.”

“They say a happy childhood is a lousy preparation for life. Kids who spend their playground days fat, ginger or gay know the truth. The world has always been full of vicious predators. For plenty of people this carnage and savagery is business as usual.”

“Human beings can get used to virtually anything, given plenty of time and no choice in the matter whatsoever.”

“I wondered if having conversations with your dog was less crazy than babbling to yourself when no one else was around. I guess it depended on whether or not the dog answered.”

“Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that's when the damage gets done and if we don't keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.”