“I like commas.”

“I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.”

“It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later.Or at least that's what my editors hope.However, I will reveal a secret to you:I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them unglued, and I like to see how how the characters in the novel cope with this problem.I have a scret love of chaos. There should be more of it.”

“I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.”

“I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong.”

“Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.”

“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”