It is a cliche, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain - from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration.

Johnny Hart became much less funny after he found sobriety, and religion, around the same time.

Ever since roughly 1890, when snot poets first decided that rhyme was confining and unnecessary, every idiot with a pen fancied hisself a poet. The mere act of rhyming was suddenly regarded as a quaint, mannered, and uncool atavism, consigning doggerelists like me to the trash bin of literary history.

I would you say 25-50 percent is the likelihood that my cause of death will be suicide. Not because I am depressive but because I don't attach any moral baggage to suicide, and I have no religion to hold me back. I think suicide is our right, though I think we need to exercise it with knowledge that it can hurt others. So my assumption is that if I got a fatal disease, I'd end things before I got really sick.

I believe men's faces come in two kinds: Faces that need a blade, and faces that need an electric. I never was happy with an electric. I became pizzaneck.

I don't think the people of Chicago should be robbed of their birthright to be perennial losers.

If I lived where I live right now, and my kids were in middle school, they would be the only white kids in the school. That is not a burden I wanted to place on them. My preference would have been a school that was totally diverse - half and half, or close. I wouldn't have hesitated at all if they would have been in the racial minority. But to be the only white kids: I don't think that would have been fair to them.