The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.

You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.

Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. It if is at all convenient, die before you're fifty. It my take a bit of doing. But I advise this is simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn't it, if you lived on to be very very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again?

Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."

My parents read the comics to me, and I fell in love with comic strips. I've collected them all of my life. I have a complete collection of all the "Buck Rogers" Sunday funnies and daily paper strips, I have all of "Prince Valiant" put away, all of "Tarzan," which appeared in the Sunday funnies in 1932 right on up through high school. So I've learned a lot from reading comics as a child.

In our time the search for extraterrestrial life will eventually change our laws, our religions, our philosophies, our arts, our recreations, as well as our sciences. Space, the mirror, waits for life to come look for itself there.

Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.