Bad books on writing tell you to WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

[Spielberg and I] had a disagreement over what God was....He thought God was Stephen Spielberg, but that thought had never occurred to me.

Don't 'write what you know.' Make up something new!

Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.

Rationalism doesn't require belief, only observation. The real, measurable world doesn't care what you believe.

Writer's block? Don't worry about it. Either it goes away or you die.

Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.

I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.

Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.

Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.

A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.