Alfred Bester Quotes

This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks... but nobody loved it.

Reading has always been a major part of my life. It has broadened my world and taken me to places I would otherwise have never seen. Now that I am a hundred years old (this September) it still takes me to the outside world I can no longer visit.

The sweets of pillage can be known To no one but the thief, Compassion for integrity Is his divinest grief.

The second half of the 20th century was a golden age of molecular biology, and it was one of the golden ages of the history of science. Molecular biology was so successful and made such a powerful alliance with the medical scientists that the two together just flourished. And they continue to flourish.

It's the digital era. What makes it exciting is that it's both the Golden Age of television and the Wild West of television. Something is happening now that's unprecedented, and we know that we're a part of it. What could be more exciting or better than that? You can't lose because you're on the pony and you're staking the claim.

I celebrated [my 50th birthday] by throwing a big bowl on the pottery wheel, then going for a water ski at the lake on our property in the Catskills, and that night, skinny-dipping under the stars. Just being free and joyful. And that's how I [felt] about turning 50.

By 78 you've done everything you're going to do. If you haven't bungee-jumped by the time you're 78 you're not going to do it.

When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.

Brother, I am too old to go again to my travels.

The radical elements in Islam are very dangerous. They want to achieve a return to the Islamic purity of the Middle Ages.

At that age, it's one of the worse things in the world to wake up and not see your bike where you left it.

Hamas does not care about the lives of Palestinians. [They don't] care about the lives of Israelis or Americans. They don't care about their own lives. They consider dying for the sake of their ideology a way of worship.

It's not just about life, of course; it's about healthy life. Getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun, whether or not dying may be fun.

He that dies in extreme old age will be reduced to the same state with him that is cut down untimely.

We lived through a relatively golden age between the end of World War II and Sept. 11, 2001.

Once in a while, when I'm alone, I think about my age. I think, How many more years do I have on this earth? But I can't really conceive of dying. Somehow, in my head, I don't think I'll die. I know that everybody dies, of course. I just think that it'll never come to me. It's crazy, but there it is.

I beg young people to travel.

You've only got so long to live.

Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age.

I'll never retire. The new millennium is the age of adventure as far as I am concerned. I'm going up a volcano and off into space.

Traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.

Often it is fatal to live too long.

As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.

Today, I find inspiration in music, art, traveling the world, and meeting new people.

I would like to grow less afraid of dying. I am infinitely less afraid today than I was 15 or 25 years ago. I was most afraid of dying when I was 33, because I come from a Catholic family.