Smoking is the only honorable form of suicide.

One of the things I'm going to say out there is how grateful I am - and how grateful the world is - for the tremendous gift of the black people, of jazz.

If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

I'm a doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit.....when you doctors figure out what you want, you'll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis.