Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one's own cherished beliefs. |
Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age. |
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. |
Miss Georgia and Mr Shaker Heights. |
Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself. |
Never have children, only grand children. |
Never have children, only grandchildren. |
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil. |
On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died. |
One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves. |
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale. |
Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable |
Rome... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled. |
roughly 80 percent of police work in the United States has to do with the regulation of our private morals…controlling what we drink, eat, smoke, put into our veins ... with whom and how we have sex or gamble. |
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself. |