A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

I am not suited to the role of going around selling the life-can-be-beautiful idea. It can be, indeed. But you don't buy the concept from your friendly door-to-door lecture salesman.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

Old friend, there are people—young and old—that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it's revolutionary mumbo-jumbo by a young one, or loud lessons from scripture by and old one. We are all comical, touching, slapstick animals, walking on our hind legs, trying to make it a noble journey from womb to tomb, and the people who can't see it all that way bore hell out of me.

If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.