A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to sho...
Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was o...
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it
The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures a...
She broke my heart. I didn't like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for.
I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds...
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful...
You know what truth is? [...] It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?
You hate America, don't you?'That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. 'It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my...
There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
The atomic bomb which we dropped on the people of Hiroshima was first envisioned by a woman, not a man. She was, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. She didn't call it an atomic bomb. She called i...
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortab...
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Mar...
That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.