“The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.”

“Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.”

“The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.”

“Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gather itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate.”

“I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.”

“Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of [parenthood] is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.”

“Life is a zoo in a jungle”