Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

If it weren't for the people always getting tangled up with the machinery... Earth would be an engineer's paradise.

I learned how to make jokes because I wanted to give people as much fun as they did, and I guess I did, too.