Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.