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.

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.

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

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

Better give a shilling than lend and lose half a crown.

Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.

To marry unequally is to suffer equally.

I don't think people know what hygienist means.

You keep customers by delivering on your promises, fulfilling your commitments and continually investing in the quality of your relationships.

My object has been, first to discover correct principles and then to suggest their practical development.

Women are natural anarchists...

A great artist has to be ready to fail.

I live, like every real man, in my work.

Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power.