“It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.”

“The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generou...”

“There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just n...”

“Big fat hairy monkey, hands a couple of octaves wide?”

“A voice said: One. One. One, two. One, two. Then the footsteps went back into the distance. After a while, another voice said: One, two, three, four- And the universe came into being. It was wrong ...”

“We're on a mission from Glod.”

“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 values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to...”

“Literature is news which stays news.”

“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, When youre ready.”