I don’t pretend to tell people how to live their lives other than to do the right thing and work hard. Everything else should take care of itself.

The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.

It may happen sometimes that a long debate becomes the cause of a longer friendship. Commonly, those who dispute with one another at last agree.

). Dozens of nations have agreed to join in monitoring and, if necessary, intercepting and boarding ships on the high seas in the event they are suspected of engaging in one or both of these...

There can be no peace in the world so long as a large proportion of the population lack the necessities of life and believe that a change of the political and economic system will make...

Online publication is fine with me, in part because I hope to collect those stories later.

I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention.

Writing, basically breaks down to relationships between people and that is what you write about.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We...

I mean, there are many other directors who are probably both more skilled and excited to adapt novels or work within certain genre conventions. I’d like to do that kind of work someday, but for...

The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.

Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind...

If the waitress shows up and doesn’t have an exit line, that isn’t true to life – I’m hard pressed to think of a waitress who just walks away.

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.

The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.

I don’t think I’d want a revival. I’m not doing a tribute to myself.

Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on?… I don’t know the answer, I know...

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.