“In an age in which the classic words of the Surrealists - "As beatiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella" -can become reality and perfectly achievable with an atom bomb, so too has there been a surge of interest in biomechanoids.”

“As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”

“I've decided that has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.”

“A perceptive French critic has argued that in an age of deepening illiteracy, when even the educated have only a smattering of classical or theological knowledge, erudition is of itself a kind of fantasy, a surrealistic construct.”

“Like the atomic bomb, it’s there; like the bomb, the temptationwill always exist to use it.There can no longer be a worldwithout the atomic bomb; there can no longer be a worldwithout violent movies.”

“It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.”