I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.

How important my books are or anybody's books are, I don't know. I don't think they are terribly important I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours.

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?

You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.

Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.

But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.