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

Human beings will believe in all kinds of things that aren't true, and that's okay. And TV is a part of that.

A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.

What is my definition of jazz? "Safe sex of the highest order."

I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.

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.

The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.