One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.

On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: 'I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun.

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.

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.