The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can't close your ears. The reason you can't close your ears is, if a lion was coming, you had to wake up. Today no lions are coming. Beeping trucks are coming. I read the other day that the guy who invented the beep when trucks go backward, he died. I thought: Of course - he dies, I have to listen to it.

If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies.

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.

Forcing people into a situation where they're supposed to adore each other is probably bad. But letting people get on and off the 6 train without stabbing each other, that's good.

The first people who died of AIDS were artists. They were the most interesting people.

China is not a great idea: capitalism and a dictator. It's like the two worst possible things you could imagine together. It's a very bad idea.