Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.

If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there's no point trying to look in that direction because it won't be coming from there.

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end".

The film project has been “twenty years of constipation,” and he likens the Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.”

He actually caught himself saying things like "Yippee," as he pranced ridiculously round the house.