There are too many books. The books are terrible. And this is because you have been taught to have self-esteem.

[On the writers she admires:] I prefer dead writers, because I don't see them at parties.

Scientists are rarely to be counted among the fun people. Awkward at parties, shy with strangers, deficient in irony - they have had no choice but to turn their attention to the close study of everyday objects.

By the time everyone catches up with you, you're bored.

...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.

If you can stay in love for more than two years, you're on something.

Think before you speak. Read before you think.