Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. ... I have 10 or so, and thats a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.

All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.

Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever.

The ideal to which John Adams subscribed-that we would be a nation of laws, not of men-was quickly subverted when the churches forced upon everyone, through supposedly neutral and just laws, their innumerable taboos on sex, alcohol, gambling. We are now indeed a nation of laws, mostly bad and certainly antihuman.

If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient."