Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

...at morning, I'm unruffled - I'll sit with my tea and Muse Cat beside me and listen to the soft chime of the grandfather clock...

The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.

It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it they remain barren.

Never speak of a man in his own presence. It is always indelicate and may be offensive .

They serve God well, who serve his creatures.

I used to have this lucky rock and I used to always have to rub it three times before I competed.

If you never want to be criticized, for goodness sake don't do anything new.

I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago.

You have to have confidence in who you are, because you never know who's depending on you.

If you want to do something, do it!