“it is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no seas repose; I pass from waking agonies to the semiconscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know ...”

“Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; thats the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any con...”

“Yes of course I know it's all a dream. Isn't everything?”

“...for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not ...”

“To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constpatory too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.”

“As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.”

“It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last...”

“The world is quiet here.”

“I've always said, stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library.”