I am better now. Word of honour: I am better now.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

One of [ways being lucky] was to go to school during the Great Depression because teaching became a plum job.

Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair.

She broke my heart. I didn't like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for.