You know, the Emancipation Proclamation was like giving freedom to domestic animals.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but the living room in your fortified compound.

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.

I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so.