“I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me...”

“The one on the left," Worthil said, "is a male, carrying the testes and penis. The middle one is equipped with a kind of reversible vagina, and ovaries. The vagina turns inside-out to implant the f...”

“The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.”

“A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the h...”

“...a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybodys either for it or against it, were against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way...”

“What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient...”

“For a long time, they sat without speaking. The air outside was filled with the lilting sound of sparrows, the buzz of traffic on Main Street, and under that the faint lapping of waves on the lakes...”

“If you can't win by reason, go for volume.”

“She meant that they'd never used words like "separation" and "divorce" even in their worst screaming matches. They yelled things like, "You're infuriating!" "You don't think!" "You are the most ann...”

“As some people turned to religion for comfort, so, Highsmith wrote in her notebook in September 1970, she took refuge in her belief that she was making progress as a writer. But she realised that b...”

“Its important that what thoughts you are feeding into your mind because your thoughts create your belief and experiences. You have positive thoughts and you have negative ones too. Nurture your min...”

“Reason, Observation and Experience the Holy Trinity of Science have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This...”