1. "About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm."
2. "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."
3. “Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”
4. "A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
5. "Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people."
6. “Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
7. "Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules -- and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress."
8. “Find a subject you care about and which you feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”
9. “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”
10. “… hummings and clickings could be heard - the sounds attendant to the flow of electrons, now augmenting one maze of electromagnetic crises to a condition that was translatable from electrical qualities and quantities to a high grade of truth.”
11. "Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease."
12. “I don't praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it 's only a glass of water. ... When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone 's wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately where the story is taking place, and who the people are. ... And you can put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other. Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. "Modern life is so lonely," they say. This is laziness. It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.”
13. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
14. "If somebody says, ''I love you,'' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? ''I love you, too. ''"
15. “If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”
16. “If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.”
17. “If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.”
18. "I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours."
19. "I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool."
20. "I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are."
21. “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can get without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
22. "I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival."
23. “Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe.”
24. “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion… I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”
25. “Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.”
26. "Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous."
27. “Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”
28. "Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next--and on and on."
29. “...moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.
30. “Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.”
31. "Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."
32. "People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore."
33. “People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.”
34. 1. Reduce and stabilize your population. 2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil. 3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems. 4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it. 5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars. 6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean and stupid. 7. And so on. Or else.”
35. “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!”
36. "Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic."
37. "There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.”
38. "There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."
39. “There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him.”
40. “The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present the world what appears to be Nature's stern but reasonable surrender terms.”
41. "The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck."
42. “The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”
43. "Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe."
44. "This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes."
45. "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand."
46. "Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away."
47. “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
48. “We are all what we pretend to be, so, we had better be very careful what we pretend.”
49. "We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love."
50. “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
51. "We are what we imagine ourselves to be."
52. "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
53. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
54. “We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.”
55. “What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called "thought."”
56. "What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?"
57. "What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'."
58. “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
59. "Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"
