At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind.

I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad—that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?

"Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

I've had an exciting relation to France all my life, from my young years in Brooklyn when I thought that Paris was the place to be.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.