I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

Normal' is a dryer setting.

There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias.

It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.

My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.

It's the easiest thing in the world to get to California-you just aim yourself west and start walking.

I have run a general election campaign pregnant and ran Ed Miliband's leadership campaign commuting to London with a new baby so I already have my system set up.

My history of lending money from banks is that they want to know the ins and outs of the backside of a duck.

Effective prayer is prayer that attains what it seeks. It is prayer that moves God, effecting its end.

Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.

You know, class is like magic. There's nothing there you can point to, it evaporates if you try to analyse it, but it's real and it affects how people behave and makes things happen.

All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind.

To get rid of an enemy one must love him.

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art.

I'm a fan of people that have quality, that do what they do and that are not into the showbiz.