It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own.... It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.

Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.