About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

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.

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.

Well, there was stuff going on, heroic events. One was what used to be, and probably still is, the largest moving project in history. The headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company used to be brick. What they did was take the old brick building - with the operators in there saying, "Number please" and all that - and they put it through a quarter of a turn and moved it half a block!

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

It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace.