People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.

I love cell phones. I see people so happy and proud, walking around. Gesturing, you know. I'm like Karl Marx, I'm up for anything that makes people happy.

That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis. [...] They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away.

The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.

Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.

bergeron's epitaph for the planet, i remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the grand canyon for the flying-saucer people to find was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT, BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP. only he didn't say "doggone.