Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.

Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot.

I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome; burn it.

You get so caught up in what you're writing - action sequences tend to do that more than anything else because you're living it, and feeling for your characters.