“Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.”

I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

Beulah has a husband?’ I know. It’s a miracle. There can’t be more than two people on the planet who’d be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town.

There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren’t available to the Romans.

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation.

The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn’t just common to me; it’s anybody who’s funny.

The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.

You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don’t want to live with them.

I think it’s only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed.

One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.

Sacrifices are concerned with the feelings of devotion and longing.

A feeling of violation swayed inside me, making me feel as if id been shoved off a high platform without warning. I was falling, and i feared the sensation far more than hitting bottom. There was no end; just a constantsense of gravity having its way with me.

Suddenly women’s lib had made me feel my life had been wasted.

It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine–something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.

Seriously, I’ve just realized that almost everyone is a fraud, so I try not to feel too bad about it.