All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

When it comes time to do your own life, you either perpetuate your childhood or you stand on it and finally kick it out from under.

Many of us write because we are readers and have grown up in a long tradition, and we want to be able to add to that extraordinary flow of interpretations of the world.

The pity of living only once is that there is no way, ever, to be sure which sorrows are inevitable.

[On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time.

They are the kind of people who are embarrassed by money, a dead middle-class giveaway. Poor people are not embarrassed by money and are contemptuous of those who are.

When it comes time to do your own life you either perpetuate your childhood or you stand on it and finally kick it out from under.

If you don't participate, you're just taking up oxygen. (Bunny)Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck)

There's nothing like the sight of an old enemy down on his luck.

I won't say I'm out of condition now - but I even puff going downstairs.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.

Being in humaneness is good. If we select other goodness and thus are far apart from humaneness, how can we be the wise?

The greater the value of what we want, the greater the sacrifice we will have to make.

I love all these politicians, they all say the same thing - 'We'll give California back to the people.' Yeah, great, now that it's not worth anything, they want to give it back to us.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

I would loathe to work on modern films.