Bad literature is a form of treason.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

All good writers are weird. Proudly weird.

Bobby Fischer is the greatest Chess genius of all time!

Physics is much too hard for physicists.

I've always hated the danger part of climbing, and it's great to come down again because it's safe.

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.

So be it. God created profoundly fallible creatures on this earth, and human history is mostly the story of error and accident.

The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

Art must be in touch with nature - and wherever that touch is gone, Art degenerates - yet it must be above nature.