... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

You gain strength with every difficulty, which you boldly overcome.

We are known to be anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, and notoriously anti-religious—more likely to quote Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Monty Python, or Star Trek than the Bible.

We have to distrust each other. It's our only defense against betrayal.

What good is a revolution anyway if it isn’t joyful?

Find a man with both feet firmly on the ground and you've found a man about to make a difficult putt.

Barney Miller' was a lot of fun. I'm very fond of Abe Vigoda. Most - a lot of people on that cast - I really liked.

I couldn't really experience being an author when I was still working in publishing - I was trying to negotiate being both. Sometimes the knowledge doesn't translate between the two roles.

True knowledge is found only among those genuinely worshiping God.

I never wanted to express my independence by dressing in a particularly masculine way or appear particularly boyish.

Fashion is defined by what later becomes out of fashion.