I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease.
To be dead and to eat at the same time.
When I'm being funny, I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done has been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.
It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.
Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.
Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please god almighty, and luck is not the hand of god.
I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished.
There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the first amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.
It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.
I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in english departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about dresden.
If you are an american, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
If you appear in the 'atlantic' or 'harper's' or the 'new yorker,' by god, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the mafia.
I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.
During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.
I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.
Never index your own book.
Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered god and photographed him in color by 1951.
All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.