everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
we're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.
"if you can do no good, at least do no harm."
laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. i myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
during my most recently controlled near-death experience, i got to interview william shakespeare. we did not hit it off. he said the dialect i spoke was the ugliest english he had ever heard, "fit to split the ears of groundlings." he asked if it had a name, and i said "indianapolis."
all writers... have pretty wives. someone should look into this.
just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe.
if god were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.
when hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon.
here is a lesson in creative writing. first rule: do not use semicolons. they are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. all they do is show you've been to college.
george w. bush has gathered around him upper-crust c-students who know no history or geography.
the only difference between bush and hitler is that hitler was elected.
human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. by saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am i in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the middle east? their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. they are being treated, as i never was, like toys a rich kid got for christmas.
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.
during my three years in vietnam, i certainly heard plenty of last words by dying american footsoldiers. not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the supreme sacrifice.
"you hate america, don't you?" she said.
"that would be as silly as loving it," i said. "it's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. it's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but i can't think in terms of boundaries. those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. i can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will."
"drawn crudely in the dust of three window-panes were a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the stars and stripes. i had drawn the three symbols weeks before, at the conclusion of an argument about patriotism with kraft. i had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to kraft the meaning of patriotism to, respectively, a nazi, a communist, and an american. 'hooray, hooray, hooray,' i'd said."
don't lecture me on race relations. i don't have a molecule of prejudice. i've been in battle with every kind of man there is. i've been in bed with every kind of woman there is—from a laplander to a tierra del fuegian. if i'd even been to the south pole, there'd be a hell of a lot of penguins who looked like me.
i am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. i keep hoping the things will kill me. a fire at one end and a fool at the other.
we have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
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.
i want to stay as close to the edge as i can without going over. out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
