Cheapness is a great virtue.

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

And what do you believe?”A slow smile spread over his face. “I believe in you. You are my new beginning.

Write what you want to write

I do think anger is so difficult for women. Girls think it undermines their femininity it's not very ladylike.

The balloon seems to stand still in the air while the earth flies past underneath.

I believe that a creative career is only as good as the risks that you take with it.

The problem with life is, by the time you can read women like a book, your library card has expired.

It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.

It is the sin which we have not committed which seems the most monstrous.

I want to do things where the talent range is difficult and that scare me. I thrive on that; if it's not scaring me then I'm not growing.

... and with my last thought I felt some real sympathy for those poor chickens.