Two radical ideas have been introduced into human thought. One of them is that energy and matter are pretty much the same sort of stuff. That's Einstein. The other is that revenge is a bad idea. Revenge is an enormously popular idea but, of course, Jesus came along with the radical idea of forgiveness. If you're insulted, you have to square accounts. So this invention by Jesus is as radical as Einstein's.

Children get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks.

I'm eighty-three and I've been smoking since I was eleven. I'm suing the cigarette company because it promised to kill me and it hasn't.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed

We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now.

The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.