I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I'm going to do that.

I'm not politically correct.

In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.

Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Science grows like a weed every year.

Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there.

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.

It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I'm going to do that.

Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.

PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.

The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.

Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.

People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does.

I'm really optimistic in the mornings.

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

I love a microphone and a big crowd; I'm an entertainer, I guess.

If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.

My grandfather milked several cows twice a day and supplied the neighbours with dairy products. He liked to go visiting around the county on Saturdays, and he also enjoyed the neighbours when they came by once a week with their empty milk jars. He walked them out to their cars and hung over the driver's side window until they drove off.

Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.

You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

Natural DNA is a tractless coil like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.

I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time.

Random acts of kindness don't have to be big or even cost money. It will however make you a better person.

I have this horrible weakness. I fall in love with my characters. 'Suspect' started as a one-shot, but I just love Maggie so much, and I love Maggie and Scott and what they have going.

Everything has positive and negative consequences.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

There are some kinds of Christianity that insist you have to believe literally in doctrine. The Gnostic gospels open out the complexity and multiplicity of approaches to this. If you think the story of the virgin birth is mistranslated for instance it doesnt mean you have to throw out the whole thing.

When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

The Old Year has gone. Let the dead past bury its own dead. The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time. All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months!

I wanted to be looked at for the skateboarder that I was. I didn't want to be the 36-year-old skateboarder who's still holding on while owning a company at the same time. I wanted to make my mark and travel and accomplish a few things here and there and then get out.

I think prejudice has gotten to a point where a lot of people hold biases in their mind and don't even realize that they're doing it, because it's deeply ingrained in the fabric of what it means to be an American.

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.

My goal is to continue to act and still be a professional kiteboarder.

Do you want to tear your life apart and get rid of everything you've known as a lifestyle? Like seeing your family? Being with your friends? A fishing trip? A hunting trip? A night's sleep?

The literature of many lands is rich with the tributes that gratitude, admiration and love have paid to the great and honored dead. These tributes disclose the character of nations, the ideals of the human race.

But there's certainly only one thing I could never agree with George Galloway on. He's a teetotaller and wants to close all the bars in the House of Commons. That is just not on.

I'm writing a new book right now that is like an erotica manifesto.