“Reputations are shaped not by facts but by prejudices.”

I do hope you have some money. I’m getting tired of hitting people.

Emerson,’ I said, choosing my words with care, ‘it is a sheer drop from the cleft down to the base of the cliff. If you are bent on breaking your arm or your leg or your neck or all three, find a place closer to home so we won’t have to carry you such a distance.

I would not be at all surprised to find that it was for gold that Cain committed the first murder. (It happened a very long time ago, and Holy Writ, though no doubt divinely inspired, is a trifle careless about details. God is not a historian).

I knew the answer, and–of course–so did Ramses. He has superb breath control and always gets in ahead of me.

The only way to do it is to do it: by writing, writing, writing.

I can do a book in three months if I spend all day, seven days a week at it and, in fact, I work better that way.

Spring is always cruel, with its false promise of resurrection.

People who relate what they believe to be new and startling information like to have such information received with exclamations of astonishment and admiration.

There is nothing sadder than the cheerful letters of the dead, expressing hopes that were never fulfilled, ambitions that were never achieved, dreams cut off before they could come to fruition.

I have no writing habit. I work when I feel like it, and I work when I have to – mostly the latter.

I do, however, think it would be difficult to write books I don’t like to read.

If you take a man by surprise, and behave with sufficient arrogance, he will generally do what you ask. -Emerson

If someone lies down and invites you to trample upon him, you are a remarkable individual if you decline the invitation.

It’s not unsporting to thrash a cowardly cad,’ said Simmons. ‘Everyone knows you don’t fight like a gentleman.’ ‘That might be called an oxymoron,’ Ramses said. ‘Oh–sorry. Bad form to use long words. Look it up when you get home.’ The poor devil didn’t know how to fight, like a gentleman or otherwise.

Marriage, in my view, should be a balanced stalemate between equal adversaries.

It is much more sensible to be an optimist instead of a pessimist, for if one is doomed to disappointment, why experience it in advance?

Complicated lives and heaps of possessions don’t necessarily bring happiness; in fact, they can bring the opposite.

Blues is a natural fact, is something that a fellow lives. If you don’t live it you don’t have it.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

Evolution is a theory, and it’s a theory that you can test. We’ve tested evolution in many ways. You can’t present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.

If there’s any mystery to me at all, it’s probably due to the fact that I’m not online and don’t go to conventions–which means that I’m probably not as accessible to fans as most writers are these days. If that makes me seem like a weird recluse, so be it.

The fact is that the Vietnamese held Americans after 1973.

A common misconception is that the costs of health care are cheaper in rural America, when in fact the reality is that they are more expensive and more difficult to access.

The single fact of existing is already a true happiness.