A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God’s great dance of proteins.

The Loneliness of the Military HistorianConfess: it’s my professionthat alarms you.This is why few people ask me to dinner,though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.I wear dresses of sensible...

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage,...

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

There were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn’t...

I didn’t much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even...

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy – people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online – but I was talking...

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don’t...

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

They’ve removed anything you can tie a rope to.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you...

The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.

The internet is 95 percent porn and spam

Potential has a shelf life.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get...

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Once she wasn’t supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn’t like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn’t. Then she was supposed to...

Had she believed all that? Old Pilar’s folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn’t quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead...

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There’s also the environmental argument for it.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he’d been invited, but at an address he couldn’t actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life...

People are now familiar with this kind of interaction. They may even have a more intimate moment that way.

Sanity is a valuable possesion; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you...

He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I’m aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization...

So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had developed friendly feelings towards him...

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds–who used to be a passionate Yeats fan–is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point...

Walking was not fast enough so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on...

Who cares, who cares. The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions.

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

You know I love you. You’re the only one.””She isn’t the first woman he’s ever said that to. He shouldn’t have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn’t have treated it...

I used to jog but it’s bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

‘1984’ is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‘Nobody under 40,’ or ‘Nobody under 25.’ With my books, it always has been, and continues...

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster...

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the...