The first book that a child reads has a colossal impact.

Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.

As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint.

Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement.

Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it.

since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.

Her smile was like a swift light passing across a darkened room.("Hair")

But this is your home''Not any longer, my poppet. Women make nests but men make bequests and scatter them. Heigh-ho!

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

Except for events that carry great weight, it is not experience per se, but how they match expectations, that governs their emotional impact

Some people believe they are winners, others believe they are losers. And they are both right.

I'm a technician. I don't go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.

If we don't like what's happening to us in the world, all we have to do is change our consciousness - and the world out there changes for us!

Once he had taken hold, he did not let go. It was not a handshake, it was a possession.

To look at possibility is to be free.

If some of this art is not for you, that's fine. Art appreciation is a subjective matter, and we each bring our own experience, knowledge and taste to the party.

I have the show because I'm insecure. It's my insecurity that makes me want to be a comic, that makes me need the audience.

I don't think of my life as a cliche, but I'm a cliche eccentric. Complete with a strange name - I mean, who's named Val? How many Vals do you know? I mean, really?