What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work?

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money

Power doesn't corrupt people; people corrupt power.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

...mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible.

Dear God, please help me to be the kind of person who my dogs think I am.

You're only young once but you can always be immature.

I have always believed that somehow the less we reveal the more the other desires to see.

That theatrical kind of virtue, which requires publicity for its stage, and an applauding world for its audience, could not be depended on, in the secrecy of solitude, or the retirement of a desert.

And I've known people who came out with a sense of torture.

The origin of civilization is man's determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.

Music stops you from thinking.

The less people know, the more they yell.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

We were all influenced by Lester [Young]. Listen to the records that he made with [Count] Basie. Nobody's got what he's got. He's still the daddy.