Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.
The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
Nobody gets excited about the future at all, ever. The future is something we find depressing and worrisome.
The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.
In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.
I want things to be better all the time. And I tend to get angry about that. Books are an opportunity to vent.
I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.
Most big companies don't like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don't like you at all.
My mother only ever said two things. She said,'I don't know, dear.'And she said,'Can I get you a sandwich, honey?
Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.
I can't fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way.
I like to do books in which a lot of the research and the writing and the thinking revolves around something American.
Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
Because time moves more slowly in Kid World ... it goes on for decades ... It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.
In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.
It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do.
I don't want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place.
I sometimes think I cannot write another passage about a disappointing meal ever again, because I've done it so many times.
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.
Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.
18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
The human diet consists of just nine plants: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye and oats.
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
In any area of human endeavour, there is going to be mediocrity. You're going to find people who get money that they shouldn't get.
The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.
The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
I've never quite understood that feeling: that you arrive in a strange place, yet you want to have nothing but familiar experiences.
Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.
Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines.
I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.
Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.
I really enjoy going to a library and spending the day doing research - to me that is the most pleasurable part of writing the science book.
Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.