Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity.

What matters are those ordinary acts of kindness and of love, not vaulting ambition with its attendant hubris and smugness.

Throughout history the exemplary teacher has never been just an instructor in a subject; he is nearly always its living advertisement.

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.

I sometimes lie awake at night and try to imagine what would be the best period in history to spend one's seventy-odd years.

Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.

Order and surprise: these are two intertwined elements that make for any great library or collection.

Best selling authors are always worth listening to, even if you choose to ignore their advice.

I am shocked that we seemed to have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from Vietnam.

I think the essence of [Kurt] Vonnegut's humanism lay in his emphasis on human kindness as, so to speak, our saving grace.

I think that his [Kurt Vonnegut's] appeal, though, will always be chiefly to adolescents. His sense of the world matches that of young people, who feel deeply life's absurdity.

Anxiety swarms in the heart like worms infect the whole body.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think.

No, I have someone who comes to the house and washes it, puts in the dry shampoo, and takes care if it because I have no time.

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970's.

I reiterate that I am strongly committed to working with those on all sides of politics to improve how Parliament operates.

A thrush, because I'd been wrong, Burst rightly into song In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only.