The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.

I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.

The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.

If he failed the first time he took his driver's licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled. He was more circumspect the next time, and passed.