One of the things I'm going to say out there is how grateful I am - and how grateful the world is - for the tremendous gift of the black people, of jazz.

The most racist, nastiest act by the USA, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away men, women, and children.

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.

If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.

The trouble with God isn't that He so seldom makes Himself known to us... He's holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically _constantly... Contentedly adrift in the cosmos, were you?... That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while.