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.

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.

In this world, you get what you pay for.

Well, it's practically over, thank God - I'm 83, there won't be that much more of it to put up with I don't think!

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

. . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.