Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

There is only one real failure in life that is possible and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

The best form of defense is attack.

Charley: If you‘re not going to tell me where you are, if you‘re not going to trust me to help you, then why are you here? Why bother? Reyes: Because you‘re the reason I breathe.

Why ask why? If it's raining it just is.

Theres not a lot of good humor in medicine, but theres a lot of medicine in good humor.

Actors are as good as they allow themselves to be, and to portray life, you have to have as broad an experience of it as you possibly can, so everything's worth it.

What kind of knife is this?” Locke held a rounded buttering utensil up for Chains’ inspection. “It’s all wrong. You couldn’t kill anyone with this.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, "The trouble with this country is...."