Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

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

Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

How embarrassing it is to be human.

There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.