Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward - and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.

[Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife] is for me a secretly deep history of a generation of middle-class American males, my own, which was taught by parents and at…

This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should n…

It's no use crying over spilt evils. It's better to mop them up laughing.

Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.

If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.