How embarrassing to be human.

It often is a terrible insult to some families if one of the kids turns out to be an artist and that's one way to really shake up the family if you haven't got nerve enough to turn into a homosexual.

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.

There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books. I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.

The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only usless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn't catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.

Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.