Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that?

Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.

The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically.

The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it

In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.