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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Your fear of the truth does not hide or dilute it.

My family is my vulnerability.

We are born into this precious human existence to achieve the uni cation of opposites and become enlightened, or liberated, from the illusion of separation.

If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.

Oh, how portentous is prosperity! How comet-like, it threatens while it shines.

My voice, I'm blessed to have it.

The essence of leadership is making up your own mind and then being able to take other people with you.

Misery is the only thing in the world that has no end or edge.

Comfort is everything. You start doing something and you want it to be perfect right away, but most babies are born ugly and then they shake it out and you get beautiful toddlers.

Exploitation, mutilation, mutations, confirmation to the evils of the world.