As long as I'm learning something, I figure I'm OK - it's a decent day.

I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actor, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach

Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth.