Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy.

That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.

I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.