"I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer." "What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?"

"You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food."

"There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look."

"No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary."

"I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on."

"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."

"Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn't mean that you're entitled to conquer the universe."

"We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should."

"She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies."

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."

"All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me."

"We could have saved [the Earth] but we were too damned cheap."

"If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off."

"People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore".""

"It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever."

"Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier."

"I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."

"No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful."

"There are too many of us and we are all too far apart."

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

"Maturity...is knowing what your limitations are...Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything."

"Ting-a-ling mother fucker."

"I can have oodles of charm when I want to."

"She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind."

"You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do."

"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."

"There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore."

"If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice."

"And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction."

"If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?"

"Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind."

"We are what we imagine ourselves to be."

"I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking."

"There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."

"I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours."

"Until you die .. it's all life."

"To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it."

"The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody."

"Everything is nothing, with a twist."

"The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death."

"Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative."

"Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?"

"A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society."

"Be patient, Ophelia. Love, Hamlet"

"Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt. "Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired. "Very good answer."

"In nonsense is strength"

"Life is no way to treat an animal."