"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

"An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words."

"There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."

"No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it."

"I don't read 'chick lit,' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill."

"Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image."

"I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating."

"There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives."