I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves. ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel.

The only people are those who don't love anybody.

In America the word revolutionary is used to sell pantyhose.

Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark.

In America sex is an obsession. In Europe it's a fact of life.

I believe all literature started as gossip.

A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.