People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free.

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.