The hopes and fears of all our years are here with us tonight.

A lot of critics think I'm stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

As Marilee and I were dressing, I whispered to her that I loved her with all my heart. What else was there to say? 'You don't. You can't,' she said.

The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me. "The big show is inside my head," I said.

What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?

A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.

It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour. A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.