"2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and nineteen minutes of film, there are only a little less than forty minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film - and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping an audience at a deep level - but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to purchase or else fear he's missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man's destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001, if presented as abstractions, would fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; as experiences in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one's being."

":Also referenced in sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact, whose opening sequence contains:"

"::"The thing's hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God! — it's full of stars!" (p. 254 of paperback edition)"

":Not present in film, but present in book as David Bowman enters the monolith, in form:"

"My God, it's full of stars."

"If anyone understands it on the first viewing, we've failed in our intention."

"An astounding entertainment experience."

"The Ultimate Trip."

"Man's colony on the Moon … a whole new generation has been born and is living there … a quarter-million miles from Earth."

"(Ranting on a mountain) Bastards! You'll all suffer! I'll show the lot of you! I'm gonna be a sta-a-a-a-ar!"

"If you don't remember the sixties, don't worry — neither did they."

"You are invited to spend an hilarious weekend in the English countryside."

"I been watching you, especially you, prancing like a tit. You want working on, boy!"

"If you're hanging on to a rising balloon, you're presented with a difficult decision — let go before it's too late or hang on and keep getting higher, posing the question: how long can you keep a grip on the rope? They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworth's, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black."

"Change down, man, find your neutral space. You got a rush. It will pass. Be seated."

"I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight."

"You're looking very beautiful, man. You been away? St Peter preached the epistles to the apostles looking like that."

"Go with it. It's society's crime, not ours."

"Come on lads, let's get home, the sky's beginning to bruise. Night must fall and we shall be forced to camp."

"I can never touch meat until it's cooked. As a youth, I used to weep in butchers' shops!"

"I'm preparing myself to forgive you. I think you've been punished enough. I think we better release you from the légume, and transfer your talents to the meat."

"I often wonder where Norman is now. Probably wintering with his mother in Guildford. A cat, and the rain... Vim under the sink, and both bars on. But old now, old. There can be no true beauty without decay."

"Sherry? Oh dear no no... No, I'd be sucked into his trap! One of us has got to stay on guard. He's so mauve, we don't know what he's planning!"

"Here hare here... ...here hare here!"

"Oh my boys, my boys, we are at the end of an age! We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that set in, shat on by Tories, shovelled up by Labour, and here we are, we three; perhaps the last island of beauty... in the world"

"I mean to have you, even if it must be burglary!"

"Oh! you little traitors. I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts. Prostitutes for the bees. There is a certain je ne sais quoi - oh, so very special - about a firm, young carrot...Excuse me..."

"(referring to his cat) Yet again that oaf has destroyed my day!"

"(referring to his cat) Get that damned little swine out of here! It's trying to get itself in with you. Trying for even more advantage. It's obsessed with its gut. It's like a bloody rugby ball now, it will die, it will die!"

"It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, "I will never play the Dane.""

"My thumbs have gone weird! I'm in the middle of a bloody overdose! My heart's beating like a fucked clock! I feel dreadful, I feel really dreadful."

"Jesus Christ! Why have you drugged their onions?!"

"You're full of Scotch you silly tool."

"We are not drunks, we are multi-millionaires!"

"A coward you are, Withnail! An expert on bulls you are not!"

"Stop saying that, Withnail, of course he's the fucking farmer!"

"I'm not from London, you know."

"[Contemplating how to kill a chicken for supper] It's got dreadful beady eyes, they stare at you. Best kill it quick before it tries to make friends with us."

""I fuck arses"? Who fucks arses? Maybe he fucks arses! Maybe he's written this in some moment of drunken sincerity! I'm in considerable danger here, I must get out of here at once."

"(Voice-over) I could hardly piss straight with fear. Here was a man with 3/4 of an inch of brain who'd taken a dislike to me. What had I done to offend him? I don't consciously offend big men like this. And this one has a definite imbalance of hormone in him. Get any more masculine than him and you'd have to live up a tree."

"(Voice-over) Danny's here. Headhunter to his friends. Headhunter to everyone. He doesn't have any friends. The only people he converses with are his clients, and occasionally the police. The purveyor of rare herbs and proscribed chemicals is back. Will we never be set free?"

"(Voice-over) Speed is like a dozen transatlantic flights without ever getting off the plane. Time change. You lose, you gain. Makes no difference so long as you keep taking the pills. But sooner or later you've got to get out because it's crashing. Then all at once those frozen hours melt out through the nervous system and seep out the pores."