The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

Somebody realized, hey, students are printing dummy ads and dummy news stories, why don't they really print something. So there was the Shortridge Daily Echo, and a hell of a lot of writers have come out of Shortridge on that account. The head writer of the I Love Lucy show, Madelyn Pugh, was a schoolmate of mine. Dan Wakefield. Writing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers.

He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.