I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

[To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset.

... all of us talk faster than we listen.

Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don't?

Still young and fine! but what is still in view We slight as old and soil'd, though fresh and new.

Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.

I am confirmed in my division of human energies. Ambitious people climb, but faithful people build.

I have done nothing; the Word has done and accomplished everything.... I let the Word do its work!

I don't always know what I'm talking about, but I know I'm right.

The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God's ape; the money complex is therefore the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.

I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged.