So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

You've got to be a good date for the reader.

Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?

Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!

Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.