I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

I'm not politically correct.

In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.

Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Science grows like a weed every year.

Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there.

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.

It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I'm going to do that.

Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.

PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.

The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.

Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.

People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does.

I'm really optimistic in the mornings.

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

I love a microphone and a big crowd; I'm an entertainer, I guess.

If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.

My grandfather milked several cows twice a day and supplied the neighbours with dairy products. He liked to go visiting around the county on Saturdays, and he also enjoyed the neighbours when they came by once a week with their empty milk jars. He walked them out to their cars and hung over the driver's side window until they drove off.

Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.

You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

Natural DNA is a tractless coil like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.

Be able to recognize the dangerous snakes, spiders, insects, and plants that live in your area of the country.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

My field is with apex predators, hence your crocodiles, your snakes, your spiders.

It's so bizarre, I'm not scared of snakes or spiders. But I'm scared of butterflies. There is something eerie about them. Something weird!

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men.

There's a lot to do when you're a kid - spiders to catch, girls to poke in the eye - stuff to be getting on with.

I am not afraid of much. I kill all the spiders in my house, and I'm planning to go skydiving. I am into girl power, and I'm very self-sufficient.

I remember when we were doing the first Dragon's Lair, I got really involved with coming up with all the little rooms and what was the danger in the room and going into it with bats and spiders and snakes.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.

We suddenly saw how people reacted in the event of massive social upheaval, and the way that the little problems in your life don't go away. You don't stop being frightened of spiders just because the world's blown up.

I like normal stuff people fear - like spiders and heights. I'm frightened by the unknown, by things that are hard to figure out and get a grip on.

I'm absolutely terrified of spiders.

Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.