Life is unjust, people can be cruel, and yet if you harden your heart, you will lose what little love there is in this world.

The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life.

Self-pity is the simplest luxury.

Dying's not so bad. At least I won't have to answer the telephone.

Youth moves out, leaving no forwarding address. No matter how you try, you can't reach that person again or that place.

Why can't peace be a single overriding common purpose: why do we wait for a crisis to pull us together? Let's pull together for peace.

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.