Is there any person in the world who does not dream? Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?

The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard's bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen.

I took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter. Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?" "Stories. And they give me hope.

Classic authors should be older than I am, and wiser, and on-top of all their deadlines.

The real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.