Look, girls don't care how many push-ups you can do. They just want to get high and wear flowers in their hair. Maybe steal a car.

Some people were born just so they could be buried.

If a person does this for just a couple of years and discovers that it just isn't for him, that's okay. At least he can move on knowing that he gave it his best shot.

The Oxys filled holes in me I hadn't realized were empty. It was, at least for those first few months, a wonderful way to be disabled. I felt blessed.

I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.

Though there are still many good people out there in the world, it seems that they're vastly outnumbered by the stupid, selfish, violent ones.

I spent thirty-two years in a paper mill in southern Ohio, and before that I worked in a meatpacking plant and a shoe factory.

A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there's something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom.

When I turned fifty, I decided to quit the mill and go to graduate school.

I sort of like writing about weird characters, I guess.

I was always a big reader, even when everything was bad and miserable.

Love in France is a comedy in England a tragedy in Italy an opera seria and in Germany a melodrama.

You have to know your own truth and stick to it. And never despair. Never give up. There's always hope.

I had a good upbringing, we didn't have any money, but there was a lot of love in my family.

History will prove me right. This is an exercise in folly.

All that matters is that you find a way to put the puck in the net. It doesn't matter how. I learned that from Mario.

So if we use birth control we don't need to be married?

We all need to get the balance right between action and reflection. With so many distractions, it is easy to forget to pause and take stock.

The time to prepare for your next expedition is when you have just returned from a successful trip.

When the balance is broken then everything includes itself in power, power into will, will into appetite. So appetite, aided by will and power, becomes a universal wolf, at last eating up itself.

I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.