Hold fast to whatever fragments of love that exist, for sometimes a mosaic is more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

A capacity for going overboard is a requisite for a full-grown mind.

I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.

I realize more and more how instinctively pessimistic I am of all human kindness -- since I am always so bowled over by it -- and am never surprised by injustice, malice or personal attack.

Yet better for one of my nature to have it that way than to have life a peaceful, placid flow of quiet contentment. I must have days of rushing excitement.

Joe and Jojo and I had lovely day together. I love Joe so much - more and more.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

I shall not be defined by what I have suffered but how I have endured them.

I cannot trust my other side, my drunken side, to act in my best interests anymore.

They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?

We are in a world where globalization, which is an ideology, has forgotten and put aside the people, the people's interests, aspirations, and dreams.

Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.

You need a particular talent only to want to please. I don't have this talent.

The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing.

When we walk towards the sun of Truth, all shadows are cast behind us.

Sometimes it's important to vote - you know, to make a statement, to make a point; certainly, many of us who were involved in the Nader campaign in 2000 felt that way.