“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.”

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies- God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

All this happened, more or less.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, ‘Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency’.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.

My life is nothing but room for you. I said. It could never be filled by anyone but you.

We’d been apart so long-I’d been dead so long, she said in English. I thought surely you’d built a new life, with no room in it for me. I’d hoped that.

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

The nicest veterans, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.

Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his own death.

Divorce was emotionally traumatic for me. It was the death of a dream. I was in fairytale land, and the reality of it wasn’t so. But I don’t really like talking about it anymore, because it feels like a thousand lifetimes ago, and also it makes me look desperate like I need it for attention.

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.

It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.

Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.