“Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.”

We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.

When I’ve had a meltdown, people will say to me, “Well, you failed to keep your sense of humor.”

You can’t expect insights, even the big ones, to make you suddenly understand everything. But I figure: Hey it’s a step in the right direction if they leave you confused in a deeper way.

The start to a better world is the belief that it is possible.

I try to be cynical, but it’s so hard to keep up.

Wouldn’t it be great if we all grew up to be what we wanted to be? The world would be full of nurses, firemen, and ballerinas.

9 to 5 made people aware of equal pay for equal work. It hasn’t really happened, but it has come closer.

Even when I’m being funny, I’m deadly serious.

Lady, I do not make up things. That is lies. Lies are not true. But the truth could be made up if yo know how. And that’s the truth.

There will be sex after death, we just won’t be able to feel it.

If evolution was worth its salt, it should’ve evolved something better than ‘survival of the fittest.’ I think a better idea would be ‘survival of the wittiest.’ At least, that way, creatures that didn’t survive could’ve died laughing.

Having a real public outlet is how you imprint something for yourself. It’s just a matter of timing. It’s like you’ve marked your territory.

I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.

You know being relevant or coming up with something interesting, funny to say about what’s current is just as hard as it might ever be depending on the serendipity of it all.

We are people with lives, not consumers with lifestyles.

Being a New Yorker is never having to say you are sorry.

Adults devise a plan and follow it, children do what feels good.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools, you got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules. When you gonna wake up?

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn’t have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.

As adults we try to relax from the never-ending quest for reason and order by drinking a little whiskey or smoking whatever works for us, but the wisdom isn’t in the whiskey or the smoke. The wisdom is in the moments when the madness slips away and we remember the basics.

As adults we try to relax from the never-ending quest for reason and order by drinking a little whiskey or smoking whatever works for us, but the wisdom isn’t in the whiskey or the smoke. The wisdom is in the moments when the madness slips away and we remember the basics.

In my adult life I’ve understood that if I put an enormous amount of love and honesty into something, usually that shows in the end.