Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.

On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.