Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog's repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty percent of people's earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive

Satire works in a bunch of specific ways, like a very precisely-geared bomb. It's a bit like something that looks harmless, and you swallow it, but once it's inside you it's too late, and it triggers, blowing up. And it's your specific inner beliefs and faulty arguments that trigger a satire bomb. If your arguments work, the bomb doesn't trigger, it doesn't need to.

In books there's nothing of the fish covered in the coldness of the sea, or the feeling of a star touching space. Bad for business.

It’s a shame, sort of a waste, that most people are influenced by what the newspaper supplements tell them is the book they are meant to be seen reading this year. It seems like those people aren’t really interested in books. If you’re really into books, you havoc all over the place picking up disparate stuff which you devour hungrily, and the ‘selection’ process is more like a sixth sense hunger, a billion miles away from fashion.

Gun stripping is the tea ceremony of America.

Since childhood I’d been suspected of imagination

One golfer a year is hit by lightning. This may be the only evidence we have of God's existence.