It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment. Our American heirs may...
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
The church, which squatted among the headstones like a wet mother dodo, had been at various times Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Unitarian, and Universally Apocalyptic. It was now the Church of God...
No respecter of evidence has ever found the least clue as to what life is all about, and what people should do with it.Oh, there have been lots of brilliant guesses. But honest, educated people have t...
This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.
I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangeable parts in the American machine.
So the people of Earth thought they had instructions from the Creator of the Universe Himself to wreck the joint. But they were going at it too slowly for the Elders, so the Elders put it into the peo...
I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.We are chimpanzees. We are oranguta...
I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that o...
There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.
When I write, I feel like an armless leg less man with a crayon in his mouth.
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC
The smoke from her cigarette passed beneath the nostrils of the brown and white girls, and their space-annihilating concupiscence seemed centered on mentholated smoke along.
Me and Mike, ve vork in mine. Holy shit, ve have good time. Vunce a veek ve get our pay. Holy shit, no vork next day.
I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatle...
She said his music was tuned to the biggest music there ever was, the music of the stars.
Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.