I've never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: 'Am I being joyful?' And if you've got a writer's block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you're writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person.

We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever.

The blizzard doesn't last forever; it just seems so.