I have a secret passion for mercy. . . but justice is what keeps happening to people.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.

There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him,, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.

I feel like my maybe someday just became my right now.

SOME PEOPLE ARE BORN LUCKY...OTHERS ARE LUCKY TO BE BORN...I SAY THE WORLD WAS LUCKY I WAS BORN

Opportunities are not to be availed but to be made.

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.

The world is made up, for the most part, of fools and knaves, both irreconcileable foes to truth.

As for the decorum at the time of a campaign, one must be mindful that he is a samurai. A person who loves beautification where it is unnecessary is fit for punishment.

My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.

I had to work on a Marlin boat, like gutting fish, like as the bait boy.

Every day, the dispensing of existence.... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.

It is only in the depths of silence that the voice of God can be heard.