No matter how wonderful a sentence is, if it doesn't add new and useful information, it should be removed.

Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?

Somebody realized, hey, students are printing dummy ads and dummy news stories, why don't they really print something. So there was the Shortridge Daily Echo, and a hell of a lot of writers have come out of Shortridge on that account. The head writer of the I Love Lucy show, Madelyn Pugh, was a schoolmate of mine. Dan Wakefield. Writing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.