All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.

Now working is terribly painful and I'm still having a fight with the booze. I've enlisted the help of a doctor but it's touch and go. A day for me; a day for the hootch.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.

Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.