The Fastest Way To Travel Is To

Every Intelligent Being, Whether It Breathes Or Not, Coughs Nervously At Some Time In Its Life.

It Was All Very Well Going On About Pure Logic And How The Universe Was Ruled By Logic And The Harmony Of Numbers, But The Plain Fact Of The Matter Was That The Disc Was Manifestly Traversing Space On The Back Of A Giant Turtle And The Gods Had A Habit Of Going Round To Atheists' Houses And Smashing Their Windows.

The Point Is That If A Book That Had Been Published Three Years Ago Started To Sell Twice As Many All Of A Sudden It Probably Wouldn't Even Get No­ticed. People Wouldn't Be Tracking It. The System Has Cleaned Up Its Act An Awful Lot But The Best-seller List System Is Not An Entirely Foolproof Thing.

The Truth Is That Even Big Collections Of Ordinary Books Distort Space, As Can Readily Be Proved By Anyone Who Has Been Around A Really Old-fashioned Secondhand Bookshop, One That Looks As Though They Were Designed By M. Escher On A Bad Day And Has More Stairways Than Storeys And Those Rows Of Shelves Which End In Little Doors That Are Surely Too Small For A Full-sized Human To Enter. The Relevant Equation Is: Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass; A Good Bookshop Is Just A Genteel Black Hole That Knows How To Read.

It's Not Morbid To Talk About Death. Most People Don't Worry About Death, They Worry About A Bad Death.