[I write] intuitively, reflexively, as if skiing down a steep mountain slope with no time to think.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

If wishes were grains of sand, the world would be a desert.

Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.

I hate flying, taking my clothes off, and going through the whole security.

So nice to be a fashion icon in my day.

There is a destiny in war, to which a brave man knows how to submit with the same courage that he faces his foes.

In a way, I'm not at all jaded, and still enjoy so much what I do. It's a good trick.

I called Donald Trump a racist. Nobody that makes that charge is being intellectually honest, or else they're being intellectually lazy.

That state is best ordered when the wicked have no command, and the good have.

I believe everything creative is somewhat collaborative.

Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.