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

“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.”

“The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.”

“You have made Commerce a god that weighs on humanity like a twenty-four-pound boil on a man's back (117-118)”

“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.”

“But at night we began dreaming of Man's perfect world without humanity (57)”