“The government isn't real," he replied. He might have been talking about Santa Claus or God. "I don't owe anything to anyone who in themselves are lies and liars.”

“I think that people don't know how to do anything anymore. My father was a janitor. He could take a car apart and put it back together. He could build a house in the back yard. Today, if you ask people what they know, they say, 'I know how to hire someone.”

“I understood about fear. And I knew better than anyone in that room what Mouse was capable of. But still I had been raised in a place where to show your fear was worse than cowardice. It was suicide, a sin.”

“We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.”

“They want to hold on to you and your people. They have isolated the ones who might grow powerful and overthrow their debauched reign.”

“If there's another writer, like Ross McDonald or Raymond Chandler, and all they're writing are mysteries, they won't be accepted," he said. "And that's problematic. A lot of so-called literary novels are just not very good. They're not well-written, they're not well-thought-out. They have pyrotechnics of intelligence."On the other hand, some of the best writers and speculative ideas are in science-fiction. The science-fiction genre is completely, completely segregated. And these people are writing good stuff. They're writing about where you're going, which means they're talking about where you are.”

“That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he’s lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.”