I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

If you believe in an idea, you don't own you, it owns you.

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze.

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.