Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.
I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of pat...
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people d...
As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full...
A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.
I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.
In nonsense is strength
So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land...
Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.
God damn it, you've got to be kind.
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor...
The Fourteenth Book is entitled, What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years? It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of o...
Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin.
I think, therefore I am, therefore I am photographable.
Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that?