I was sitting one day and thinking about cannibalism, because that's what guys like me do... and I thought, suppose a guy was washed up on a rocky island, how much of himself could he eat?

There's nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.

Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.

The rope by which the great blocks of taxes are attached to any citizenry is simple loyalty.

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

Of all the questions I'm asked, the most difficult is, "How does it feel to be famous?" Since I'm not, that question always catches me with a feeling of surrealism....I've got three kids and I've changed all their diapers, and when it's two o'clock in the morning and you're changing something that's sort of special delivery with one eye open and one eye shut you don't feel famous.

In many ways, Eulah-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.