Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.

Jokes have to be quite naked to be understood. They have to be quite simple.

Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

People stopped calling themselves Freethinkers because it was so specifically German and anything German was terribly unpopular because of the two world wars. My family became Unitarians instead - it's the same sort of thing.

How embarrassing it is to be human.