Contrary to popular belief and hope, people don't usually come running when they hear a scream. That's not how humans work. Humans look at other humans and say, 'Did you hear a scream?' because the first scream might have been you screaming inside your head, or a horse backfiring.

I don't read an awful lot of fiction and when I do, it tends to be lightweight stuff.

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

These weren't encouraged in the city, since the heft and throw of a longbow's arrow could send it through an innocent bystander a hundred yards away instead of the innocent bystander at whom it was aimed.

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

It was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying.

The thing is, I mean, there’s times when you look at the universe and you think, “What about me?” and you can just hear the universe replying, “Well, what about you?”