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.

The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.

It's a small world. When you put it in a cemetery, it is.

Don't put anything into a story that does not reveal character or advance the action.

And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor.

Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again.

The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.