I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

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.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth,” the long out-of-print science fiction writer went on.

To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.

Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn’t,” I said.”So everybody alive must have the Survivor’s Syndrome. It’s that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me...

The occupying Russians, when they discovered that we were Americans, embraced us and congratulated us on the complete desolation our planes had wrought. We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper modesty, but I...

What is the secret of life?’ I asked.‘I forget,’ said Sandra.‘Protein,’ the bartender declared. ‘They found something out about protein.‘‘Yeah,’ said Sandra, ‘that’s it.

Almost every war ends, properly, with its veterans feeling deceived and pointless and gullible, with their being persuaded that all participants were equally vile.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too,...

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to...

He didn’t know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.

He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. “Hate to do this, Bill,” he said of the fungi he was murdering. “Fungi have as much right to life...

My gosh,” I said, “another human being.””You’ll never know how human,” she said.”Maybe I will,” I said. “I could try.”I did try, and I do try, and I give you the toast of a happy...

You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.

Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself — will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are...

Is this some kind of joke?””That’s for me to know and you to find out.””Maybe you think it’s funny to put up signs about people who want to commit suicide.””Are you about to?””And what if...

Human beings used to be molecules which could do many, many different sorts of dances, or decline to dance at all –as they pleased. My mother could do the waltz, the tango, the rumba….

Nous esperons que notre grand-père vivra encore longtemps.

There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.–“Bomar

Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.

I’m wild again, beguiled again, a wimpering, simpering child I am.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.

As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something...

The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it-and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed...

I hear he liked flowers pretty well.””Yes,” said Annie, “he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him.”–“Out, Brief Candle

I think it’s important to live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy.

My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

I thought the worst of everyone.

There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message– describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other....

‎The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that’s the soul seeking...

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...

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

There’s only one me, and I’m stuck with him.

The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn’t want to be used by anybody.

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...

It was as natural as breathing to all human beings, and to all warm-blooded creatures, for that matter, to wish quick deaths for monsters. This was an instinct.

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of...

The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing,...

There were no windows in the Stockholders’ Records Section of the Treasurer’s Department of the American Forge and Foundry Company. But the soft, sweet music from the loudspeaker on the green wall by the clock,...

It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.

Be patient. Smile. Be confident. Everything will turn out for the best somehow.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done

There’s the whole story of life!

He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life some day,’ the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. ‘Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d...

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want...