Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'

What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.

We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.