"You don't believe in God," I said to Stein. "God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus." "Santa Claus has had a tremendous influence, exist or not." "For children." "Lots of saints have died for God with a courage that's hardly childish." "That's part of the horror. It's all a fantasy. It's all for nothing."

We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

Let us hope, I prayed, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.