Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to...

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

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...

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!

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.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

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.

I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means.

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.