Novelists From The United States

"Trotter its all wrong. Nothing turned out the way it was supposed to." "How do you mean supposed to? Life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough." [..] "If life is so bad, how come you're so happy?" "Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?"

"If there was anything her short life had taught her, it was that a person must be tough. Otherwise, you were had."

"Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts."

""Why don't we change our clothes and watch TV or something over at your house?" He felt like hugging her. "I'll make us some coffee," he said joyfully. "Yuk," she said smiling and began to run for the old Perkins place, that beautiful, graceful run of hers that neither mud nor water could defeat."

"Even a prince may be a fool"

"He was angry, too, because it would soon be Christmas and he had nothing to give Leslie. It was not that she would expect something expensive; it was that he needed to give her something as much as he needed to eat when he was hungry. [...] She wouldn't laugh at him no matter what he gave her. But for his own sake he had to give her something he could be proud of."

"Time travel is so dangerous it makes H-bombs seem like perfectly safe gifts for children and imbeciles. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen with a nuclear weapon? A few million people die: trivial. With time travel we can destroy the whole universe, or so the theory goes. No one has been anxious to test it."

"Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it."

"There’s always a way to work out your problems if you’re only take a look at them and then do what needs to be done. For instance, when I found that three mornings in a row I had shut off my new alarm and gone back to sleep, I put the switch in the kitchen and tied it in to the coffee-maker. When you’re up and have the coffee perking, it’s too late to go back to sleep."

"I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them."

"You've got to watch yourself when you get as old as I am. You have to try new things, sometimes for no better reason than that they’re new. Otherwise you rust."

"We’ve become a race of engineers. What we never seem to understand is that after it’s time to railroad, there’s time to build a beautiful railroad. The state of the art has advanced enough; we can afford to pay a small penalty in efficiency."

"It was not pleasant to admit what one is willing to do to go on living."

"If only she could convince them, perhaps she could convince herself."

"She was a reader; there were many citizens who were not. The prevailing social explanation for illiteracy was that there were people who were temperamentally unsuited for reading—and indeed there were few callings in a computerized, video-saturated world that required literacy. Lilo accepted that, but had always had a feeling that most people never learned to read because they simply were not smart enough."

"This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases."

"But now she was fifty-seven, and suddenly ancient. Soon she would be dead. Dead. You can’t get any more ancient than that."

"Religion and science don’t mix well, as science likes to observe and draw conclusions—to learn, in other words—and religion cares only about learning the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, etc. They don’t need to learn about this world, because they already know. A good way to describe a wasted life, as far as I’m concerned. Religious people already know things, with no more proof than some words in an old book. In short, they’re crazy."

"I am vehemently anti-religion. That is, organized religion. I despise them all. I try to despise them equally, but lately Islam has shot to the top of my hate list, for obvious reasons. I don’t give a shit what they do in their own squalid little dictatorships, but they seem to want to export “Submission” to the whole world, and they are willing to kill the likes of Salman Rushdie and those Danish cartoonists for insulting Islam. They are basically living somewhere around the 8th Century, and I often wish I had a time machine to send them back there. (Yes, I know there are moderates. So why don’t they do something about the zealots?) So when I mention religion at all in my stories, the practitioners are usually doing something nutty. About as nutty as praying five times a day facing Mecca, saying a rosary, handling deadly snakes, or speaking in tongues."

"She looked at me askance. “Of course I bribed him, Victor. You’d be amazed to know how cheaply. Does that bother you?” “Yes,” I admitted. “I don’t like bribery.” “I’m indifferent to it. It happens, like gravity. It may not be admirable, but it gets things done.”"

"I had kept a straight face under worse provocation, so I trust I did well enough then."

"Buildings were just the world's furniture, and he didn't care how it was arranged."

"There was something at the core of the world of business that refused to adjust to children in the board room, while appearing to make every effort to accommodate the working mother."

"Semantic content zero, nonsense quotient high."

"I didn't become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptom of which is the ability to ignore it while your society develops weeping pustules and has its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots."

"Why is it that once having decided what I must do, I'm afraid to reexamine my decision? Maybe because the original decision cost me so much that I didn’t want to go through it again."

"What they had going certainly came as near as anyone ever has in this imperfect world to a sane, rational way for people to exist without warfare and with a minimum of politics. In the end, those two old dinosaurs are the only ways humans have yet discovered to be social animals. Yes, I do see war as a way of living with one another; by imposing your will on another in terms so unmistakable that the opponent has to either knuckle under to you, die, or beat your brains out. And if that’s a solution to anything, I'd rather live without solutions. Politics is not much better. The only thing going for it is that it occasionally succeeds in substituting talk for fists."

"They had a good picture of the world as it is, not the rosy misconceptions so many other utopians labor under. They did the jobs that needed doing."

"They understood the basic principles of morals: that nothing is moral always, and anything is moral under the right circumstances."

"They were testing ways whereby people didn't have to live in Chicago. It was a wonder to me. I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea."

"She was already putting her distance between herself and this woman she would kill. She was becoming an object, something she was going to do something unpleasant to; not a person with a right to live."

"Thou shalt not screw around with things you do not understand."

"Me, I don’t know if I was born a pessimist or had pessimism thrust upon me. What I do you know is that I’ve had ample reason to embrace the philosophy."

"There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window on something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness."

"It’s unpleasant to find that what you had thought of as moral scruples suddenly seem not quite so important in the face of a stack of money."

"I thought his lack of curiosity must be monumental, but I was wrong. It turned out that he had some queer notions about the morality of the whole process, ideas he had gotten from some weirdly aberrant religion in his childhood. I had heard of the cult, as you can hardly avoid it if you know any history. It had said little about ethics, being more interested in arbitrary regulations."

"I’m decrepit, but I ain’t senile."

""In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman."

"I have come to believe, based on long experience dealing with humans, that no true story ever gets told. I sit here now with two stories, about to add lies, half-truths, or simple misunderstandings of my own, moved by some vague urge toward a completeness of things—a completion that can never be achieved."

"“You see…when you get right down to it, I don’t believe you have my daughter. I won’t until I see her. And having seen her, I won’t believe I could lose her again.” Sherman looked at him for a long time. “The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve.”"

"By then I was sure the universe could no longer surprise me, nor interest me. I was wrong. It managed to do both in no more than ten minutes."

"I hate inefficiency. You’d have to look a long long ways before you found a better example of it than the press conference."

"We were in the middle of a festival known as Christmas, which seem to take up the whole month of December. There was a big tree decorated with lights, and various other decorations hung around the buildings. Christmas was a time for spending money, traveling, and getting drunk. It had originally been a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, but by the 1980s that had been largely forgotten, replaced by a new totem in a red suit and a false beard."

"Sherman looked surprised as an infallible Pope holding a losing ticket at the racetrack."

"The nice thing about being a pessimist is that bittersweet is an improvement."

"Just because Beethoven doesn’t sound like currently popular art doesn’t mean his music is worthless."

"“Don’t be such a pessimist.” “All time travelers are pessimists.”"

"Computers, contrary to what you may have been told, are not smart. They’re just fast. They can be programmed to act smart, but then it’s the programmer who’s actually smart and not the computer. If you give a computer long enough to chew on a problem it will usually solve it. And since a long time to a computer is about a millionth of a second, they give the illusion of being smart."

"Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language."

"I don’t have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or Gods, or Good Guys winning out in the end. I have seen destiny in action, and I can tell you, it stinks."