The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

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

I'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all!

Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.

People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.