America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

If you think about something else hard enough, you can mostly control your feelings.

If the majority cannot be punished then they can only be transformed

I do twenty minutes every time the refrigerator door opens and the light comes on.

Many Southern writers must have learned the art of storytelling from listening to oral tales. I did. It gave me the knowledge that the simplest incident can make a story.

The government would have preferred not to take a stand, but the constant presence of the Israeli-Arab conflict on our television screens made it an issue that could no longer be avoided.

The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.

I'm never gonna try it, because you got to pay a lot for cocaine, and that's not the way I want to spend my money.

A path to citizenship for those who are here illegally in my view is unfair to those waiting sometimes a decades in line to come here.

The first time you face up to a googly you're going to be in trouble if you've never faced one before

Do not lose joy in life as you grow old in years. Let not your 'joie de vivre be crushed under the weight of years.