I am better now. Word of honour: I am better now.
Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there’s nothing else he can do.
Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.
Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.
I consider writing an act of good citizenship.
His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.
What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.
We are America’s Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.
I urge you to please notice when you are happy.
Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?
The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I’ve done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae.
I went to New York to be born again. And when the train plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
A society is only as healthy as its ideas are humane.
I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.
If Jesus was alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal.
Just because something feels better than anything else, that doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.
Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.
That’s what is was to be young – to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.
If people insist on living as if there’s no tomorrow, there really won’t be one.