I don't believe in happiness anyway... it's too much of an American pastime, this search for happiness. Just forget happiness and enjoy your misery.

First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family.

I'm more interested in writing than in performing.

If you were mean to your parents, they'd give you a good belt in the gob and send you flying across the room.

Andy says, I don't understand how they can give loans to people who want to spend two weeks lying on the sand at the goddam Jersey shore and then turn down a woman with three kids hanging on by her fingernails.

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

And, of course, they've always condemned dancing. You know, you might touch a member of the opposite sex. And you might get excited and you might do something natural.