I am the victim of a fortunate series of accidents.

The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.

He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.

What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world.