People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.