All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

Hold fast to whatever fragments of love that exist, for sometimes a mosaic is more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

A capacity for going overboard is a requisite for a full-grown mind.

I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.

I realize more and more how instinctively pessimistic I am of all human kindness -- since I am always so bowled over by it -- and am never surprised by injustice, malice or personal attack.

Yet better for one of my nature to have it that way than to have life a peaceful, placid flow of quiet contentment. I must have days of rushing excitement.

Joe and Jojo and I had lovely day together. I love Joe so much - more and more.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.

Anger, hate, blind temper, that crazy switch to destroy, all of it purified into discipline and control, the best side of boxing, Billy says.

The world produces enough food to feed the entire population. It's a travesty that anyone should go hungry anywhere.

The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

Up to 80 percent of the fish that we catch spend at least part of their lives in estuaries.

No two wars are identical.

One mechanism of repression is the grand jury.

I never set out to achieve anything, certainly not fame like this,I still have to deal with how to actually make my life work.

Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it's effective precisely because it's not a polemic.

Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.