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

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.

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

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.

To some education is just a bore

I can't bear literary snobbery.

This is wrong. Out of this world wrong.But then again, so am I.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Well, I lost my virginity in a car. But it wasn't a very nice one.

Sometimes life has a way of putting us on our backs to force us to look up.

Thankfulness makes much of little.

... some important factor doesn't lose its "share of force" just because some "expert" can better measure other types of force.

People like death and mayhem.

I will commit not the terrible crime of aiming too low. I will do the work that a failure will not do. I will always let my reach exceed my grasp.