Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.

Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.

The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.

Whenever I read _Time_ or _Newsweek_ or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind?

Those who dream of the joys of living in a space colony should live in a space colony.

We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.