“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

How nice – to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

The only proof he needed for existence of god was music.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Science is magic that works.

If somebody says ‘I love you’ to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? ‘I love you, too’.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

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

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies- God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

All this happened, more or less.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

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

I always want to confuse people in terms of any kind of image and be unpredictable in any kind of movie I make.

Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Women, in general, are not part of the corruption of the past, so they can give a new kind of leadership, a new image for mankind.

My objective was to hurt the other fighters. I wanted to hurt them. I wanted to be merciless. Man, I was a wild thing. It’s kind of a drug, a rush.

This is kind of weird, but I eat lemons with salt as snack. They’re so good!

In my experience, it’s all wonderful with girls until about 16. Around that time, boys kind of calm down and start focusing their testosterone. Girls get a little challenging, especially for fathers.

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

I was the kind nobody thought could make it. I had a funny Boston accent. I couldn’t pronounce my R’s. I wasn’t a beauty.