She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.

The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.

Say your name over two hundred times and discover you are no one.

Bad writing is more than a matter of (expletive deleted) syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that. And what I keep coming back to is [her] dying declaration: 'So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.'

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

Good luck is just bad luck with its hair combed.