If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.

It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.