A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

[To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset.

Every good gift comes from God.

You find love, not by looking, but by giving away.

The truest smiles are those which spread across our faces when no one's watching us.

And I look at Harley, and the billions of stars are in his eyes, and he's drinking them up, pouring them into his soul.

Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased —facts the new trues.

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared to believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance.

When you go to home plate with a lot of confidence, you feel that you can hit any pitch.

The basis of art is change in the universe.

A Constitution is not the act of a Government, but of a people constituting a government, and a government without a constitution is a power without right.