It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.

A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out. Everyone rushed after it, shouting "Stop! Stop! Why did you do that?" "Becuase I am a panda," said the panda. "That's what pandas do. If you don't believe me, look in the dictionary." So they looked in the dictionary and sure enough they found Panda: Racoon-like animal of Asia. Eats shoots and leaves.

There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.