This music won't do. There's not enough sarcasm in it.
The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.
How could anyone survive even a single day, if he didn't feel as if he was, in some little great way, needed?
I'm astonished how little fright I have of my own imagination. It really does baffle me that I don't get more scared because I'm capable of thinking up things that are so awful. On any given day I can imagine the worst.
This is a slow business to have success in. There are exceptions, but for the most part it's kind of like the last writer standing. . . . I've got gray. I've got plenty of gray. I'm creating a career slowly, like a coral reef.
I would like to say that I have software that allows me to model worlds to a high degree of scientific plausibility. I'd also like to be six foot two and fifteen years into my reign as Emperor of Europa. The simple truth is that past the character's name and a long history of making my own body cover distances, I did very little in the way of targeted research.
For honest insight into who you are, don't ask yourself what your priorities are for next week. Ask what your priorities were last week.
How about slipping out of those wet things and into a dry Martini?
I'm not much of a partier anymore. I enjoy clarity much more.
Yet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless. . . Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it.
On one planet [earth], and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter.