Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Big John’s son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would finally amount to something. But then Little John came home in a body bag.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
As far as I’m concerned, the Universe is a junk yard, with everything in it overpriced. I am through poking around in the junk heaps, looking for bargains. Every so-called bargain, has been connected by fine wires to a dynamite bouquet.
Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
Anybody who has traveled this far on a fool’s errand, has no choice but to uphold the honor of fools by completing the errand.
Any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people’s blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.
