There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.

Traveling is more fun - hell, life is more fun - if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on Earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: "I say, is that a sn--

I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.

Before, prior to. There is no difference between these two except length and a certain affectedness on the part of 'prior to.' To paraphrase Bernstein, if you would use 'posterior to' instead of 'after,' then by all means use 'prior to' instead of 'before.

Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do.

A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)