“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”

All variables are independent.

A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.

Ills are many, blessings few, but dreams tonight will shelter you.

If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It’s a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.

You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm.

But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn’t felt it go away, as if he’d known the best moment to let go.

I was dreaming about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

Can’t say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

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

I’m quite claustrophobic, and I don’t like everyone crowding around and shouting the same questions.

But I have to add – and this answers your other question – this catholicity in time and in space is only meaningful for me if there is, at the same time, a concentration on the Gospel.

I’m ready for Joseph Parker. The question is, is he ready for me?

The question isn’t at what age I want to retire, it’s at what income.

In mathematics, the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems.

When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted friendship – when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us.

A lot of people question how talented I am. But I’m a real dude and I know real things and I’ve seen real people get their head blown off.

God is speaking to all of us, all the time. The question is not, to whom does God talk? The question is, who listens?