We're really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbra Streisand song, 'People who need people are the luckiest people in the world' - she's talking about cannibals. Lot's to eat.

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.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

And if you say that's because you lot barged into her home like a herd of mentally deficient sheep, I'm disowning all three of you.

Don't worry about what other people think. Do what makes you happy. Do whatever it takes to make the people in your life happy. Court joy as if it were the air that you needed to breath[e].

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?

...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.

I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.

One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them.

Yes, I heard my people singing!-in the glow of parlor coal-stove and on summer porches sweet with lilac air, from choir loft and Sunday morning pews-and my soul was filled with their harmonies.

He who travels in search of something which he has not got, travels away from himself and grows old even in youth among old things.

The only form of music is melody, without melody music is not feasible, and music and melody are quite inseparable.

The fact is, you can say you love God and sing that you trust God and put him first, but your checkbook is where you can show just how much God's grace means to you.