Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

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

Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.

Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful.