Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, signif… - Aldous Huxley

That's what the human brain is there for — to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there's a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that's religion.

There was something called democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal.

Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know—one can't escape it—but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex than the people one knows.