“I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. Confused people can make no clear demands.”

There’s nothing in the world like that first taste of beer.

The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental.

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

I keep myself amused and others confused

People think that if you’ve written a book and somebody’s given you a pat on the back then, you know, it’s all – you’re all settled, you know? You’re going to be fine. I know that if I’m not confused, and really afraid, my work isn’t going to be any good.

I always want people to be confused, to be shocked or realize something later.

Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering.

I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts – facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

A great many of us have confused change with progress.

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.