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

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.

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.

What bothers you isn't so much whether you're beautiful or not. What bothers you is the way that people stare.

As long as I win I'm doing something right.

Someday I’d like to see something rise up out of the earth –just for the sake of variety.

The rainiest nights, like the rainiest lives, are by no means the saddest.

I don't get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I see them as symbols, and I leave them to the symbol-minded.

I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.

Acknowledge that a more closely integrated Europe is no longer an unqualified American interest.

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

Anytime you test for a TV show, you have that bit of squeamishness entering into it because they lock you in for a number years.