Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

I learned how to make jokes because I wanted to give people as much fun as they did, and I guess I did, too.

He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Take it from somebody who has been around for a million years: When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars.