We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as "rank presumption".

I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!