Charlie Asher: Mrs. Ling, is that duck wearing trousers? Mrs. Ling: Could be . . . . You hear of paper-wrap chicken? This duck in pants.

An adventure story is fear recalled in comfort.

It's wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.

If there was anything I learned from John the Baptist, it was that the sooner you confess a mistake, the quicker you can get on to making new and better mistakes.

It's like time travel only, you know, slower.

Tommy moved on. "Lash, your people have been oppressed for hundreds of years. It's time to strike back. Look, you don't have your MBA yet - they haven't completely juiced you of your usefulness yet. Would Martin Luther King back down from this challenge? Malcolm X? James Brown? Don't you have a dream? Don't you feel good, like you knew that you would, now?

She was an alien, really - a sort of eating, pooping, tantrum machine - and he didn't understand anything about her species.