People don’t like to be lectured to, but if you can make them laugh, their defenses come down, and for the time being they’ve accepted whatever truth is embedded in your humor.

The more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward those who are responsible for that repression. But too often sarcasm passes for irony, name-calling passes for insight, bleeped-out four-letter words pass for wit, and lowest-common-denominator jokes pass for analysis. Satire should have a point of view. It doesn't have to get a belly laugh. It does have to present criticism.

I guess I'm a spiritual secularist, if that's not an oxymoron. My paths of secularism and spirituality are the same: I try to do the appropriate thing at each moment.

Avoid internalizing society's sexism, racism, ageism - pick an ism, any ism.

Watch yourself as though you were observing a Martian.

I am neither for conformity nor non-conformity. I am for individuality. If one's individuality is in effect non-conformity, then so be it. But basically, one's individuality consists of conformity--to one's self.

I had become an atheist at the age of thirteen, when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.