“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.”

“The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you dont always get what you thought you were asking...”

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

“When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.”

“If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligentl...”

“I like living in my head because in there, everyone is kind and innocent. Once you start integrating yourself into the world, you realize that people are nasty, mean creatures. They're worse than z...”

“And then, suddenly, an extraordinary question rose in my mind, whether this stupendous globe of green fire might not be the vast Central Sunthe great sun, round which our universe and countless oth...”