What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.

The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion of Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." Bokonon's paraphrase was this: "Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.

I learned how to make jokes because I wanted to give people as much fun as they did, and I guess I did, too.

The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.

That's what my books are, now that I'm a grownup - mosaics of jokes.