“What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?”

“What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?”

“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?”

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

“The whole book is posing a question. You think you've won a war - what you've done is finish a war. There was a crime committed in that war the like of which perhaps was never committed in human history. You think about it.”

“We have to face it at last. We're not all human.”

“I find it very difficult to talk here now because I'm watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. I've spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If it's an image of anything, I think it's an image of our own unconscious, the unconscious of our own minds... or you can put it the other way around, and that is that we have a sea in us. After all, we are sea creatures that learnt to walk on the land, are we not? And perhaps one way or another we go back to it. Every night when we dream we go back into that kind of depths, and that kind of beauty and monstrosity and mystery. So really the sea is not a single image, it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover.”