“The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn’t just common to me; it’s anybody who’s funny.”

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation.

The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.

You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don’t want to live with them.

I think it’s only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed.

It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.

Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.

It gets better. It seems hard, you know, I think being different is always gonna be a tough climb.

That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

In real life, I am emotionally confused, which enables me to write songs. I’m a Pisces, and they say that Pisces are very sensitive.

If you’ve driven over to the gay section of Los Angeles, it’s like a golf course… Real estate values go ‘boom!’

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

If your real wages are declining, your job is at risk, you fear your children will be worse off than you are

The more I help out, the more successful I become. But I measure success in what it has done for the people around me. That is the real accolade.

We get real picky about frequencies. Put it on a tape, start on tape, and it’s kind of locked to how it sounds.