“Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”

Don’t do what you can do – try what you can’t do.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

You get born and you try this and you don’t know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people.

Don’t bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Civilization begins with distillation

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curious – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

The ideal woman which is in every man’s mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand.

There’s certain little sounds that I just like to hear.

I pity them and the nation dependent on such for its existence. I am thankful, however that, though such people make a great noise, the masses are not like them.

I don’t like magic – but I have been known to make guys disappear.

It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

I want my fans to feel like we’re always in touch. Because without ’em, I wouldn’t be able to do any of this.

Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

Do I feel like I’m 65? No. I feel like I’m 15. That’s my problem.

But I work harder now because I have so much more exposure. And actually the harder you work as a writer, the better you get at it. It’s like anything else. It’s a muscle you have to exercise. I write more now than ever.