Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

I'd rather have written "Cheers" than anything I've written.

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.

Take it from somebody who has been around for a million years: When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.