Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that — romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.

Kurt Vonnegut speaking to John Irving while Irving was administering the Heimlich maneuver in response to Vonnegut's uncontrollable coughing..."John,stop- I am not choking. I have emphysema.

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

If God were alive today, He'd be an atheist.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.