New beginnings can be painful ends. What your attitude is changes ends into new beginnings.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time.

A poor attitude does not do the body any favours. Smile and the world will smile back at you.

Read and write all the time. Never stop sending out your stuff. If you're constantly writing and sending stuff out, eventually someone will bite.

My greatest joy is in helping others be their best.

A hero is a man who does what he can.

My attitude is that if anybody of any age wants to read a book, let them, but I do think that no child would want to read 'Boneland.'

You gotta do common things, uncommonly well.

Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.

Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain consciousness

But the bottom line is that, as humans, we are by nature selfish creatures. The only way we care about anything, really, is by making it about us.

Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy.