There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

...we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.

If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die.

The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.

In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion.

[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.

Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.

No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.

Lord of the Muck.

And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.

In every kind of adversity, the bitterest part of a man's affliction is to remember that he once was happy.

Anyone can have a once-upon-a-time or a happily-ever-after, but it's the journey between that makes the story worth telling.

Also, I preached to gangs on the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx - and miracles began to happen.

Lady Queen," he said, "You've given me all I want. You're the queen a librarian dreams of.

Man first creates the universe in his image, and then turns round to say that God created man in his image... As Voltaire quipped, if God created man in his image, man has returned the compliment.

Old age is women's hell.

You see, that's the whole point of being in government. If you don't like something you simply make up a law that makes it illegal.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.