Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-co...
Oh, a sleeping drunkardUp in Central Park,And a lion-hunterIn the jungle dark,And a Chinese dentist, And a British queen--All fit together In the same machine. Nice, nice, very nice;Nice, nice, very n...
Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.
JOE HELLERTrue story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.I said, Joe, how does it make you feel to kno...
I want to stand 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.
I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.
And 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. So she was turned into a...
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in a...
While the British colonel set Lazzaro’s broken arm and mixed plaster for the cast, the German major translated out loud passages from Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s monograph. Campbell had been a fairly we...
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.
The most heartbreakingly beautiful girl I ever hope to see
Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly better then no drugs at all.
Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn't mean that you're entitled to conquer the universe.
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.
If onThe serious way Mark talked about the rule reminded Charlay what a marvelous age ten was. And Charley thought it was a pity that everybody couldn't stay ten for the rest of their lives. I everybo...
I don't reveal to her that I love her. I keep poker faced. She might as well be looking at a cantaloupe, there is so little information in my face, but my heart is beating.
He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.
Fucking was how babies were made.
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in m...