People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.

Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.