Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.

All was forgiven. All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.

A first grader should understand that her or his culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society...Cultural relativity is defensible, attractive. It's a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.

I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.

Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.