You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet..

Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather..

This was not some pretty little girl, coyly flirtatious, delicately stimulated. This was the mature female of the species, vivid, handsome and strong….

New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust popul….

Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in t….

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible..

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge..

I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to s….

Up with life. Stamp out all small and large indignities. Leave everyone alone to make it without pressure. Down with hurting. Lower the standard of l….

Way over half the murders committed in this country are by close friends or relatives of the deceased. A gun makes a loud and satisfying noise in a m….

Old friend, there are people—young and old—that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humo….

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold..

[To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset..

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck..

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write..

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential sel….

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly..

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable..

The dividing line [between friends and acquaintances] is communication, I think. A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enter….

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit..

The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality..