The reason for privacy is not so that people will not know you go to the bathroom. It's to allow certain things to go on that you don't want other people to know about, when all is said and done. But the things I don't want other people to know about are not my sex life.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.