My family in a nutshell

"... who present without modification, year after year, the spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal daily round."

--Marcel Proust,  Du cote de chez Swann, translated by Moncrieff

 

While reading a retrospective of 1960's SF, I found this line by John Boston:

" Ben Bova, whom I am beginning to think of as the 60-cycle hum of Amazing,..."

Some authors cannot be summed up in a single line; many can; and that comes damn close to encapsulating Ben Bova in a nutshell.

"As a dog returns to its vomit, a fool comes back to his folly"

"A man might write such stuff for ever, if he would but abandon his mind to it".
---Samuel Johnson

'"Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit."