When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.

I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?

Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.