Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

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?

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

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

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

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

Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

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

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

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

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

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.

During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.

I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station.

I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.

I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

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

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

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.