The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

Son,' my father said to me, 'someday this will all be yours.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.

One [television] program was an interminable exploration of the question: can a woman with a low I.Q. be happily married to a man with a high one? The answer seemed to be yes and no.