"Writing books isn't a drastic departure from..." - Quote by George Carlin

“An outsider longing to be on the inside is the same as the soloist longing to work in an ensemble. I get great satisfaction in being a part of the proper - for me - community. I'm uncomfortable with various social groupings and clusterings. But when I'm in the right group, doing the right thing, I get as much satisfaction out of that as anyone who does it all the time.”

“Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?”

“The first obligation I have is to be funny; it's my first impulse and an instinct. I like being funny and finding the jokes.”

“When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn't exist. TV didn't exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.”

“My little notebooks were beginnings - they were the ground into which I dropped the seed... I would work in this way when I was out in the crowds, then put the stuff together at home.”

“Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat andpotatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.”

“I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.”

“In literature imitations do not imitate.”

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”