I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.

Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.

You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

Sometimes a good idea comes to you when you are not looking for it. Through an improbable combination of coincidence, naivete and lucky mistakes.

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.

Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

I can see that the sadness has returned. And it's not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.

My parents didn't know what to do with me. They got me into Little League Baseball, I played out in right field, cause I stunk.

No one ever complained their way to the top.

...A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from - toward; it is the history of every one of us. It is a great art to saunter.

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

Everybody has their days of misfortune.

Everything is expressed through RELATIONSHIPS.

I think the American people should express their preferences and we'll accept their choice.

Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me anymore.