“Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well.”

“Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.”

“In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.”

“I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.”

“As for the human case, the generation of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope.”

“Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.”

“There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”