America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn't that fabulous?

This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.

The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas.

Bland writing - timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing - is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies.

Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years.

The scientist keeps the romantic honest, and the romantic keeps the scientist human.

There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum.