There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

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.

[People] want to feel superior, so they imagine we're Bible thumpers and uneducated and all that.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.

Out in the world I go! Muggers! Autograph hounds! Junkies! People with real jobs! Maybe an easy lay! United Nation functionaries and diplomats!