You’ve got to be a good date for the reader.
I would have been dead if it weren’t for that great gift to civilization from the Chemistry Department of Harvard, which was napalm, or sticky jellied gasoline.
There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.
You become who you pretend to be.
Educate yourself, welcome life’s messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.
Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so.
High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.
There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go.
I love cell phones. I see people so happy and proud, walking around. Gesturing, you know. I’m like Karl Marx, I’m up for anything that makes people happy.
Writers can treat their mental illnesses every day.
Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.
Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.
During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not.
Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
Take it from somebody who has been around for a million years: When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.
How embarrassing it is to be human.
There were creative-writin g teachers long before there were creative-writin g courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.
Bill Gates says, ‘Wait till you can see what your computer can become.’ But it’s you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work-not the damn fool computer.
You don’t do art for any other reason than to help your soul grow.