I’ve written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

Trap is new. It didn’t start yesterday, but when I was 5, it didn’t exist – not even in the U.S. I’ve evolved with the music.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.

I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‚Star Trek.‘ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

Eventually, all companies are replaced.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.

To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I’ve got books I need to read.

In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

Every human being is under construction from conception to death.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

I read a lot when I’m travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

I was brought up to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

I had not expected ‚A Brief History of Time‘ to be a best seller.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

The march of the human mind is slow.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Creationists make it sound as though a ‚theory‘ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

I cannot live without books.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.