Live truth instead of professing it.

I’m doing a book, ‘Chasing Science,’ about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.

After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed.

Movies and television shows based on comic books constitute the worst single genre in the history of filmed entertainment (with the exception of porn).

Love as if you liked yourself, and it may happen.

To underestimate one’s thirst, to pass a given landmark to the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running water – there is no help for any of these things.

It was enough just to sit there without words.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

Some directors hardly talk to the actors at all.

There is in every true woman’s heart, a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.

It wasn’t until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

Well, a few years ago I think I could have given you a more enthusiastic answer about that but in the last few years, for the first time in my life, I really haven’t listened...

When the business interests… pushed through the first installment of civil service reform in 1883, they expected that they would be able to control both political parties equally.

Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.

A signature always reveals a man’s character – and sometimes even his name.

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

The big new development in my life is, when I turned 80, I decided I no longer have to do four pages a day. For me, it’s like retiring.

They took my mother’s stomach out six months ago.

Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.

Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.

Shared laughter is erotic too.

I was too heavy to be a jockey and too honest to be a producer, so I became a writer.

It was like electronic euthanasia.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

With Storytelling, at least, it’s explicit: this is what the censors say American citizens, no matter what age, are not permitted to see, even though it can be seen by other people all over the...

There is in every woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

Hitler’s economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

By the end of high school I was not an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.

I’d really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.

How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success?

Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren’t all that great).

The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.

If the area were on or near the U.S. continental shelf, such data could well provide an enemy with strategically invaluable insights into undersea access routes that could be used to attack some of the...

Though the general principles of statecraft have survived the rise and fall of empires, every increase in knowledge has brought about changes in the political, economic, and social structure.

Whether the medium is ready for consumers is better judged by those consumers. I sometimes read online – but not often. The stigma is attached to pay scales. Much online publication is no pay or...

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise.

You can try to reach an audience, but you just write what comes out of you and you just hope that it is accepted. You do not write specifically to a generation.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

I’ll just say, you hope you have an imagination at work you hope it has the support of your life experience and what you’ve observed and so forth.

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.

Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.

I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn’t instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly...

If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don’t think I’d have trouble doing that.

The bankers made loans to business so that the volume of money increased faster than the increase in goods. The result was inflation.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

I guess my idea of a good audience is one that’s quiet and listens, but also that’s alive: they respond, they’re getting the jokes, they’re with me. And that’ s been happening.