We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil, and its derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever.

Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.

If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.