I don't know what anybody else in the world would want to thank America for, but man, it [jazz] works. What I like about it - and what public health people ought to like about it - it's safe sex.

What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

It's a small world. When you put it in a cemetery, it is.

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.

I didn't know then what a sperm was, and so wouldn't understand his answer for several years. "My boy," he said, "you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles-- champions every one.