"Do you realize that all great literature — "Moby Dick,""Huckleberry Finn,""A Farewell to Arms,""The Scarlet Letter,""The Red Badge of Courage,""The Iliad and The Odyssey,""Crime and Punishment,"the Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade"— are all about what a bummer it is to be a ...human being?"
"Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done."
"You are better than you think. A-one, a-two a-three."
"The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."
"I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind."
"1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them."