Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy. - Robert A. Heinlein

Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce — render emotional — his audience, each time.

The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally.

A half hour later I had a headache and a plan, but it called for an accomplice. The plan, I mean. The headache I could manage alone.