“Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult game.”

“I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.”

“Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.”

“The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it.”

“To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on [something] and walk away from it, you are still on the [same] road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”

“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”

“To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.”