Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.

Hitler at the end thought that he himself was one more casualty in the war.

I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.

Because of the movies nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.