Many of our newly smart would rather be found murdering their children than being kind to their parents. They would prefer to be damned for rudeness than to be snickered at for courtesy.

Life is always at some turning point.

It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic, a symbol rather than reason by which men are moved.

The best test of the quality of a civilization is the quality of its leisure.

Sophistication demands honesty; it does not require ill temper.

The contemporary hero, the mythical pattern in the imitation of whom we would live, remains as yet undefined. We have no hero; what is more to the point, we suspect hero worship.

The discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a human being from having one.

The outlook for our country lies in the quality of its idleness.

God may still be in His Heaven, but there is more than sufficient evidence that all is not right with the world.

To the modern spirit, disillusioned, or at least unillusioned, the great evil to be avoided is sentimentality.

By the year 1982 the graduated income tax will have practically abolished major differences in wealth.

You have the world at your feet if you have wisdom in your mind.You have the world in your hands if you have joy in your heart.You have the world in your bosom if you have love in your soul.

But you will admit that it is a very good thing to be alive.

Some people can carry a tune but they seem to stagger under the load.

Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.

Most people that work in [show] business, if they're not gypsies by nature, become gypsies, just because of the reality of this business.

I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.

I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.

It's very important that there should be cross-fertilisation between government and academia. Both parties can benefit from having a better understanding of how the other works.

I think anything that anyone writes thats any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

A friend had commented once that Neal had a gift for making someone want to punch him just for saying hello.