The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.
I’d rather have written “Cheers” than anything I’ve written.
We are what we pretend to be so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.
I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.
I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.
This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.
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.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.
When I’m being funny, I try not to offend. I don’t think much of what I’ve done has been in really ghastly taste. I don’t think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.