So that’s what art is, for the artist, ” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

We understand more than we know.

These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

He feels the need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion—his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.

He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.

You need to give money when someone gives you a knife. So the bad luck won't cut you. I wouldn't like it for you to be cut by the bad luck, Jimmy.

She wasn't stupid. She just didn't want to put her neuron power into long sentences.

I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy.

A minute’s success pays the failure of years.

In my screenplays - from the very beginning I've always used tape. I talk my screenplays. And then have somebody transcribe them.

Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

You canna expect to be baith grand and comfortable.

Truthfully, my films don't get funded, they get adopted - and are made thanks to the generosity of others.

I don't know if any of the people perceive themselves as having been made fun of.

Talk to yourself in two languages - what do I fear and what do I love - in order to balance the body and the soul.

Man is the plumeless genus of bipeds, birds are the plumed.

The reality is that we've seen the last of any serious price wars for a long time. I don't think any of the others could afford it, certainly not on a long-term basis.