Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.

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.

It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

Don't beg for approval or expect respect. Respect comes from within and your choice to allow people to take it from you, by how you teach them to treat you.

Someone's opinion can be right on target, or it also could be cluttered with their doubts. Therefore, be careful, do not make someone else's opinion your law.

The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital.

I'm only superstitious on the tennis court.

Ooh. Top secret angel business, huh? What’re you going to do? Dance on a pinhead? Lobby for National Cute Puppy Day?

Intelligence is a measure of how well you function within your level of awareness.

We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.

The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.

The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.