"It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them."

"It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control."

"We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that we still have to make a study of 'and.'"

"Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn't."

"Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised."

"The joke in our family is that we can cry reading the phone book."

"Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader."

"I don't watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I'm reading at the moment 'Freedom,' by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I'm loving it."