We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

With courage, confident and commitment, the dream is possible.

We are so caught up with the affairs of this life we give little attention to eternity.

So many comics have such low self-esteem.

NO one deserves anything less than being loved.

Everything on earth has happened before, nothing is new, but woe to the lovers who fail to discover a fresh blossom in every future kiss.

I was in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses in the '60s.

I’m sort of known in the comedy community as “Smooth Sailing,” just ’cause everything always goes great. I’ve always had success at every turn.

And so Yoshimi heard the dry pop one more time. Her forehead felt as if it were being crushed by a car. That was all.

It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.

I believe in ceremony. I think ceremony is important, pomp and circumstance, tradition. I'm into those things.