Shortridge High School was an elitist high school. In a way it was a scandal because you could go there no matter where you lived, if you could get there. It was for over-achievers. It was for people who were going to college. So we were very special and we were hated for being ritzy.

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

If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.

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

I'm eighty-three and I've been smoking since I was eleven. I'm suing the cigarette company because it promised to kill me and it hasn't.

"Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt. "Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired. "Very good answer." Castle was respectful.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.