Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
At odd and unpredictable times, we cling in fright to the past.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing-to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics-Well, they can do whatever they wish.
Selflessness implies fun. Its fun to be free. Freedom is inner stillness and not being haunted by your desires, your fears, your aggressive tendencies. . . it's being cool.
A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I had it, I couldn’t find a place for myself within it. A clear gap separated me from it, and this caused me great confusion. I felt as if I were not anchored to this world - this world that I had hated so passionately until then; this world that I had continued to revile for its unfairness and injustice; this world where at least I knew who I was. Now the world ceased to be the world, and I had ceased to be me.
I didn't respond, because naked people never win arguments.
It is essential to the sanity of mankind that each one should think the other crazy - a condition with which the cynicism of human nature so cordially complies, one could wish it were a concurrence upon a subject more noble.