There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".

Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren? Do I care? Doesn't everybody? Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

I think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitious.