Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.

Were you proposing to shoot these people in cold blood, sergeant?" "Nossir. Just a warning shot inna head, sir.

I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.

The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog's wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has it's own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It's like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.

I express preference for a chronological sequence of events which precludes a violence.

It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.

There are plenty of people who believe that Elvis is alive, or that aliens occasionally land here to do highly personal things to people, or that the whole idea of evolution is a conspiracy of godless scientists. Almost all of these people can vote and some of them have got guns.