That's what my books are, now that I'm a grownup - mosaics of jokes.

The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley. Newt's painting was small, black, and warty. It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be.

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.