Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.

I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.

There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.

The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.

One thing I found out was that we need extended families. We need gangs. And, of course, if they're tribes and clans and so forth have been dispersed by the industrial revolution by people looking for work wherever they can find it. And a nuclear family, a man, a woman and kids and a dog and cat is no survival scheme at all. Horribly vulnerable.

Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.