The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his sense, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

This was a Darkness born of fire.

Nurture a tree today, and it will provide you fruit tomorrow.

I have to teach myself. I kind of wish I'd continued with my education, but that's something I can do in the future.

Tell your kids they are perfect the way they are, but they shouldn't stay where they are forever because growing, testing the limits, and evolving make life better and more fulfilling.

But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.

I'm Italian and we curse a lot when we talk.

And that whole do-able/undo-able thing? Yeah. Need I point out that neither Ruth nor I have ever "done" anybody in our lives?

Stand-up has the best writers, because it's the hardest writing by a million miles.

The city of angels? It's the city of devils. The city of smiling cobras.

I don't really have a pattern yet. I don't know if I'll develop one. As far as comedic integrity, I don't have integrity in general, comedic or otherwise.