When you're rich, you don't have friends; you just have endless acquaintances.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured.

My old man taught me two things: 'Mind own business' and 'Always cut cards.'

Specialization is for insects... The race of man? He's a whole other creature.

A zest for living must include a willingness to die.

But if you didn't have more urgent things to do after supper [in boot camp], you could write a letter, loaf, gossip, discuss the myriad mental shortcomings of sergeants and, dearest of all, talk about the female of the species (we became convinced that there was no such creatures, just mythology created by inflamed imaginations - one boy in our company claimed to have seen a girl, over at regimental headquarters; he was unanimously judged a liar and a braggart).

The bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s conception of a giant intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive.