I tried for the longest time to find out what deconstructionism was. Nobody was able to explain it to me clearly. The best answer I got was from a writer, who said, 'Honey, it's bad news for you and me.

If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.

The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.

There's more private security in the United States than there are publicly funded forces, like police. What you don't want is a meld of government and commerce - you really want to keep those two things separate - because once you have that meld, you've got megacorruption, and you have no third force to whom you can say this stuff is poisoning our kids.

There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.

... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.