But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

I gather that a lot of the "pots" in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.