A genius is no more—and no less—than someone who insists on the truth, while others face the other way.

Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.

There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what I'm talking about.

A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.

Man first creates the universe in his image, and then turns round to say that God created man in his image... As Voltaire quipped, if God created man in his image, man has returned the compliment.

Wonder begets culture, which begets yet more wonder, and the end of wonder is wisdom, which is the state of perpetual wonder.

Our life is just as long or short as our remembering: as rich as our imagining, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking.

Love, like madness, can only fill the models that society makes available.

The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.

Love is like chickenpox. It's much worse when it comes late.

Of all funny things, truth is the funniest.

Nature has always been and always will be, as far as my tiny brain can understand, miraculous. Except, nature won't last because the world won't.

Security is superstitious. It doesn't exist in nature

Earned money brings you security, borrowed money gets you slavery.

Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

In politics, merit is rewarded by the possessor being raised, like a target, to a position to be fired at.

I actually love technology. I worked for 18 years as systems analyst in technology.

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.

The tactician knows what to do when there is something to do; whereas the strategian knows what to do when there is nothing to do

I'm a country boy. I hate New York. But that's where things happen, so I use it as a base for stories, I know enough about it. But I have to keep going back there.