When you travel around the country, you see what a tough town New York is: rude, competitive, a town where good, logical ideas are ignored in favor of unworkable ones. And yet, all these other towns are so dead and boring compared to New York.

I can't minimize the terror factor. As you get older you get more and more frightened because the terrible indignities of old age become closer to you.

I have great faith in the actors. When they improvise, it always sounds better than the stuff I write in my bedroom. When they improvise, they make it sound alive.

Anything worth knowing cannot be understood by the human mind.

I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats. (On the KKK)

I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member.

The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife - a depressing thought, particularly for those who bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held. On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily laying down.