Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.

Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.

Our classes were relatively small. Those small classes can feel like family. After a class in French or chemistry or whatever, we'd be talking in the halls about what we just learned.

That's the point. Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they're wonderful, and that they're going to have a baby-- that's wonderful, when actually they're as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.