Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever.

A good friend is a person who thinks you're one of the good eggs, even if he knows you're a little cracked.

We'd all be alot happier if we'd stop assuming we're supposed to be happy.

Don't pour the oil directly into my navel, pour it on my sternum and let it run down into my navel, you ignorant peasant.

When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.

A boy wrote me once to say that he loved it when the news from Lake Wobegon came on the radio because it meant that his parents stopped arguing. That was an eye-opener for me. You work hard to polish your act and then you find out that it does people good in ways you couldn't predict.