All these years, he thought, dreaming about a companion. now i meet one and the first thing i do is distrust her, treat her crudely and impatiently. and yet there was really nothing else he could do. he had accepted too long the proposition that he was the only normal person left. it didn't matter that she looked normal. he'd seen too many of them lying in their coma that looked as healthy as she. they weren't, though, and he knew it. the simple fact that she had been walking in the sunlight wasn't enough to tip the scales on the side of trusting acceptance. he had doubted too long. his concept of the society had become ironbound. it was almost impossible for him to believe that there were others like him. and, after the first shock had diminished, all the dogma of his long years alone had asserted itself.

You came to depend on that sort of thing. Then something occurs and all bets are off. One shocking incident and all the years of logic and acceptance are displaced and, suddenly, the jungle is in front of you again. Man, part animal, part angel. Where had he come across that phrase? He shivered.

It was entirely an animal in that truck out there. "Duel" (1971), a short story, which he later adapted into a screenplay for Duel (1971), Steven Spielberg's first feature-length film. Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form. Introduction to an Omnibus edition of his work, as quoted in Somewhere in Time (1998), p. 318 - 319 It is my conviction that basic Reality is not all that perplexing. What seems difficult to assimilate are the manifold detailsof Reality, not its fundamental elements. Introduction to The Path (1999), based on ideas presented in Thinking and Destiny (1946) by Harold W. Percival, p. 11 Our world is in profound danger. Mankind must establish a set of positive values with which to secure its own survival.