Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.

I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world.

Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace.

What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?

Television wrecked the short-story branch of the industry, and now accountants and business school graduates dominate book publishing. They feel that money spent on someone's first novel is good money down a rat hole.

Puritanism had fallen into such disrepair that not even the oldest spinster thought of putting Susanna in a ducking stool; not even the oldest farmer suspected that Susanna's diabolical beauty had made his cow run dry.

A boat to your average woman is just one more damn house to take care of, only it's more uncomfortable, and the man orders her around like Captain Bligh, and she doesn't trust the machinery or the plumbing, and she has to walk six blocks to buy groceries or to get the laundry done.

The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

I concluded that my mind was so ordinary which is to say empty that I could never be anything but a reasonably good camera. So I would content myself with a more common and general sort of achievement than serious art, which was money.

Fullers cigar in the night was a beacon warning carefree, frivolous people away. It was plainly a cigar smoked in anger.