If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing.

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

Here you are. Would you like some pickles?”“Pickles gives me the wind something awful.”“In that case—”“Oh, I wasn’t saying no, ” Mistress Weatherwax said, taking two large pickled cucumbers.

Become an expert in one fundamental area of your market or business, no one starts out as a generalist.

The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set ... is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as 'chaos'.

The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

In the mere concept of one thing it cannot be found any character of its existence.

You have to see it on a broader level. But you also have to activate it properly.

All things are created twice; first mentally; then physically. The key to creativity is to begin with the end in mind, with a vision and a blue print of the desired result.

The hunger of the spirit for eternity - as fierce as a starving man's for bread - is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity.

Gradually the true Mason gains experience in using these working tools and can observe subtler and subtler indications of personal flaws.