“A pet rock is a serious commitment and too much responsibility for a ten year old to handle on his own”

“All errors are just ordinary, what extraordinary sin can you commit? All the sins have been committed already. You cannot find a new sin - it is very difficult, it is almost impossible to be original about sin. For millions of years people have committed everything that can be committed. To be thrown in hell for your sins. Now this is too much! you can throw a man into hell for five years, ten years, twenty years, fifty years. If a man has lived for seventy years you can throw him there for seventy years.and that is if you only believe in one life. It is good that they believe in one life.”

“Writing my own novels in the '90s...I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor. ”

“There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises”

“The boy, a ten-year-old copy of the man...”

“His were the eyes of one who had seen too much suffering to take suffering too seriously.”