I'm in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn't have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it?

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you're going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you're going all out.

It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.

On the 1st of August, 1774, I endeavoured to extract air from mercurius calcinates per se [mercury oxide]; and I presently found that, by means of this lens, air was expelled from it very readily. … I admitted water to it [the extracted air], and found that it was not imbibed by it. But what surprized me more than I can well express, was, that a candle burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame… I was utterly at a loss how to account for it.

In a matriarchy men should be encouraged to take it easy, for most women prefer live husbands to blocks of shares and seats on the board.