My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don’t read much or think much — who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.

I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.

That’s the point. Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they’re wonderful, and that they’re going to have a baby– that’s wonderful, when actually they’re...

A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away – even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of...

If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.

I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do

Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the...

I wanted all thingsTo seem to make some sense,So we could all be happy, yes,Instead of tense.And I made up liesSo that they all fit nice,And I made this sad worldA par-a-dise.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted...

A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to...

I already know about human beings.

This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything...

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed

American humorist Kin Hubbard said , “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be”. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very...

E’ chiaro che capisco che la ripugnanza ispirata persino adesso, e forse per sempre, dalla parola “comunismo” è una degna risposta alla crudeltà e ottusità dei dittatori dell’URSS, che si erano definiti comunisti con lo...

It posed the question posed by all such stone piles.: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones...

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.

When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, “You think your dad’s a good chemist? They’re turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a...

The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean.

People who sell bolts and nuts and locomotives and frozen orange juice make billions, while the people who struggle to bring a little beauty into the world, give life a little meaning, they starve.–“$10,000 A...

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “science fiction” … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

It’s embarrassing to be human.

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

There are plenty of good reason for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part...

He would make a good lamp post if he’d weather better and didn’t have to eat.

Make love when you can. It’s good for you.

There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for an appreciable length of time.

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each...

You are better than you think. A-one, a-two a-three.

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And...

History! Read it and weep!

You’re the man who stands on the street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, ‘I love you.’ And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square...

This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.

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.

Another woman told Constant what it was the crowd felt it had a right to. ‘We have a right to know what’s going on!’ she cried.

She said his music was tuned to the biggest music there ever was, the music of the stars.