I never wanted to be "a writer"; I only ever aspired to be an science fiction writer. They'll tear that badge out of my cold dead hands.

At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.

To see something marvelous with your own eyes-that's wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you'll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold only have an incomplete half of it, and that it won't ever really exist as a whole until you're together, talking or thinking about that moment ...that's worth more than one plus one. It's worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can't even imagine it.

As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn't built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.

A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

Without risk in our lives, we're scarcely better than machines ourselves.