“Meeting a namesake is one of the most delicate and most brief surprises.”

“She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.”

“A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.”

“Even the most casual study of the record...would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken.”

“I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.”

“For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material.”

“Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.”