My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.

I am against the notion of style in itself

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that

Puns are a form of humor with words.

Tobacco is the opiate of the gentleman, the religion of the rich.

I was an avid radio fan when I was a boy, as well as a great lover of comic strips