“Why, how much did you tip him?'Ford named a figure again.'I don't know how much it is,' said Arthur. 'What's it worth in pounds sterling? What could it buy you?''It would probably buy you, roughly....”

“One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living.”

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”

“The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.”

“I think we have different value systems." Arthur"Well mine's better." Ford”

“Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things ...”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want ...”

“I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.”

“Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to ...”

“We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques - that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arri...”

“It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.”