“Of Henryson as of Chaucer it can be said that the picturesque detail owes its effectiveness to the solidity and seriousness of what it grows from. Henryson's Fables (like La Fontaine’s – they deserve the comparison) do more than present types of human beings in animal guises and animals comically behaving like human beings; they build up a total and consistent society, both rendered and criticized.”

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 67e

Eating Animals (2009)

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 162.

The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: When I was seventeen I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogt — all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction — but my big science-fiction influences are H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. I’ve found that I’m a lot like Verne — a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo — who in a way is the flip side of Melville’s madman, Ahab — goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace.

Source: Reflections (1999), p. 118

Se não formos capazes de viver inteiramente como pessoas, ao menos façamos tudo para não viver inteiramente como animais.
Source: Blindness (1995), p. 116

"Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites", in his political journal The Campaigner (May-June 1978), p. 64.

Christianity and Vegetarianism (1990)