The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.

I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.

So you love me," said Petra softly when the kiss ended. I'm a raging mass of hormones thet I'm too young to understand," said Bean. "You're a female of a closely related species. According to all the best primatologists, I really have no choice." That's nice," she said.

So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.

It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.

Intellectual understanding does not always bring visceral belief.