“I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.”

“Yet I was wound up. I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place, I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself on the white paper. The rivets join us together and yet for all the passion we share nothing but our sense of division.”

“I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.”

“I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.”

“I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.”

“We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.”

“Bit by bit [the Second World War] really changed my view of what people were capable of, and therefore what human nature was.”