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.

What should young people do with their lives today? many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose beethoven's fifth.

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

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

As a humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us a-bombs.

I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.

Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.