The universe is almost what we would have to call an art making machine, an engine for the production of ever more novel forms of connectedness, ever more exotic juxtapositions of disparate elements.
from the lecture "Opening the Doors of Creativity", 1990.
— I fear I am ill qualified to recommend myself to strangers.
— Shall we ask him why? Why a man of sense and education, who has lived in the world, should be ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?
— I... I have not that talent which some possess, of conversing easily with strangers.
— I do not play this instrument so well as I should wish to, but I have supposed that to be my own fault, because I would not take the trouble of practising!
— You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one privileged of hearing you could think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.
Awards doesn't matter. People have supported me, and that is the greatest award I have deserved.
— Hey, even though I'm much more popular, we have some things in common.
— Breathing?
Let me come in. I won't say anything. I just want to listen... What is it you're saying?
— Can we maybe put the phones down and have an actual human conversation?
— We can, but thanks to Steve Jobs we don't have to.
You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not.
They simply happen to regard sex as both a physical and a spiritual experience.
Trouble is when you’re sober you don’t want to see anybody, and when you’re tight nobody wants to see you.
"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm anti-social, they say... I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it?. Social to me means talking about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice... But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not... They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball... Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lamp-posts, playing `chicken' and 'knock hub-caps. I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another... Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?"
But if nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.