But he is tired. He puts the pistol to his head again. He says, “I never asked to be born in the first place.

I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.

The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.

I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer." "What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?

This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy - because we're experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that's what's going on now.