A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.

Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.

[Books] will visit you at your convenience, whether you are lonesome or not, on rainy days or fair. They propose themselves as either transient acquaintances or permanent friends. They will stay as long as you like, departing or returning as you wish. Their friendship entails no obligation. Best of all, and not always true of our merely human friends, they have Cleopatra's infinite variety.

I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.

A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.

We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.