“All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”

“He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.”

“Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.”

“Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.”

“Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.”

“Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.”

“Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make the...”

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

“A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”