“Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”

Length is usually intensity. Not time.

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’ but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.

If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?

Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.

A screaming comes across the sky.

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one’s enemy only when his back is turned?

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.

The reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.

Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.

Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts–census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.

There is an ambush everywhere from the army of accidents; therefore the rider of life runs with loosened reins.

By education I am an Englishman, by views an internationalist, by culture a Muslim and a Hindu only by accident of birth.

I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

You weren’t an accident. You weren’t mass produced. You aren’t an assembly-line product. You were deliberately planned, specifically gifted, and lovingly positioned on the earth by the Master Craftsman.

A photograph is not an accident – it is a concept.

Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke.

In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental.

We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.