“I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.”

Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

He who is last had best laugh.

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

What I like least about myself is my belligerence.

I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

I am only at home in the present.

I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.

While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

You have to operate from the sense of everything is new and you’re starting again.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils.

I’ve had a hip replacement, I’ve beaten cancer, I had my hand operation, and I stopped drinking. Something inside of me just went, ‘I’m done.’

What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Theater acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser.

The only reason I’d ever get a sex change operation is to see what it’s like to be right all the time.

Catching the apple doesn’t overturn the law of gravity or the formulation of a new law. It’s merely an intervention of a person with freewill who overrides the natural causes operative in that particular circumstance. And that is, essentially, is what God does when he causes a miracle to occur.