He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow.

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

The pain is real. Flowing as a brook beneath my flesh. I am broken, and yet, I still breathe.

My goal tonight is to maintain a steady stream of invincibility. If I hit stage four—“I’m Invisible”—I’ll likely pass out, and that would ruin all my fun.

I refuse to admit that I am more than 52 even if that makes my sons illegitimate.

I owe nothing to Women's Lib.

One of the great inventions of the twentieth century was the studied, methodical engineering of myth for political ends.

[The] noblest of [Arabs] united the love of arms with the profession of merchandise.

There is no more democratic government than a revolutionary government.

I studied at the Academy during the years of economic sanctions. Life was almost dead because the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the civilized world were so strict.

Let no man write my epitaph. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.

I'm so poor I can't even pay attention.