Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument.

We were German-Americans in a British colony, so we were outsiders.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

The Circle Theatre, black people had to sit in the balcony. Any theater with a balcony, black people had to sit up there. Black people couldn't check into any hotel except their own. And black people couldn't eat anywhere except in their own restaurants.

Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

What passes for culture in my head is really a bunch of commercials.