Writer Quotes

I have no mouth, and I must scream.

I hate being wrong, but I love it when I'm set straight.

I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but don't talk to me like I'm stupid.

Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled.

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

To my three sons, Peter, Scott, and Alexander who pulled me from the 18th Century and back into the present on a regular basis and therefore made me a better person, thank you. And to my wife, who sits at the table there. Who is right about almost everything.

It is as if Clinton had called one of the most respected character witnesses in all of U.S. history to testify that the primal urge has a most distinguished presidential pedigree.

Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made.

Death is the last enemy: once we've got past that I think everything will be alright.

Rounding to the nearest cent is sufficiently accurate for practical purposes.

Cents are the most universally used interval measure.

It was inevitable that in doing this I should arrive at new results, and it is perhaps understandable that in the end I have felt impelled to present these results not only in the dry form of a catalogue, but also in a more connected and personal one.

There is a strange kind of human being in whom there is an eternal struggle between body and soul, animal and god, for dominance. In all great men this mixture is striking, and in none more so than in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Sometimes the picture that emerges of the man seems no longer to agree with our conception of the musician. In reality, however, there is a glorious unity.

Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.

In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.

If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other people's, then that must feel pretty good.

I'm not a nice person.

I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating.

For a long time on Earth humans didn't worship good gods; that's a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.

Experimental science is fascinating, but I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I'll read about it.

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.