“After listening to Rick Santorum, I'm now for late-term abortions (say up to age 53).”

“I used to be a hopeless romantic. Now I'm just hopeless.”

“People ask what's up with this writing business? What do I hope to accomplish? I tell 'em I'm just a brick mason; words are my bricks and I'm building a skyscraper -- one brick at a time.”

“Lately the muse has been treating me like Ike treated Tina.”

“Chester watched it shining clearly above the picnic grounds. Soon an astronaut would step down off the LEM of Apollo 11 and plant his foot on what had once been hallowed ground. Science would intrude on what for all known time had been the sole domain of poets and dreamers alone: the moon. After that, well -- one thing was for certain: no matter what they found up there, it would never again be as easy for a father to tell his young son that the mysterious ball of light that appeared in the heavens each night was really just a hunk of old cheese floating in the sky. Nothing would ever be that simple again.”

“Packy watched her walk away, her perfect heart-shaped rear end testing the confines of her tight black dress. There was a God. Packy was now certain of it. How else could such heart-stopping beauty be accounted for? Such a thing could not be the product of a random universe. A flower, maybe. A rainbow, perhaps. But not Venus Versailles.”

“And so once again peace reigned in his kitchen cabinet. The voices he'd been hearing as he lie in bed stopped. His doctor took him off the Lithium. Tho every now and again he'd hear what seemed to be the sounds of love making emanating from the kitchen . . . and the muffled sobs of a can of refried beans. Probably just the Mexican couple in the apartment upstairs. (From "Kitchen Cabinet Confidential")”