The only book Knight didn't steal was the one he most often saw. 'I had no need for a Bible, ' he said.

Knight's disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - 'he had no deep insight into nature'...

I'm not used to seeing people's faces. There's too much information there. Aren't you aware of it? Too much, too fast.

I read. That's my form of travel.

He left because the world is not made to accommodate people like him.

Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.

That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable." Later he added, "I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.

There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain, ' Knight said.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude "that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

you can tell who you are the way people respond to you.

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.

In my world, everyone's a pony and they all eat rainbows and poop butterflies!

We are more speedily and fatally corrupted by domestic examples of vice, and particularly when they are impressed on our minds as from authority.

I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.

There are real indignities and real problems when all facets of life are controlled –when to get up, to eat, to shower-and chemicals are put inside our bodies against our will.

The person I enjoyed interviewing the most was Elmo from Sesame Street because he is so unpredictable and he is always eating my hair and my face.

Even stones have a love, a love that seeks the ground.

When people say to me don't the years go fast I have to be honest and say that whereas I don't realise where they go in the long term, I pack so much into a year it seems to take forever.

At no time, when the astronauts were in space were they alone, there was a constant surveillance by UFOs.