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.

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.

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.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army.

I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.

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.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.

If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.

Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this 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.

I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.

Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

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.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.