John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.
There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
At the typewriter you find out who you are.
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.