“You know, at parties, people always ask, "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" Well, I don't have an alibi!”

“Stuffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but it’s worse when you see them wearing dark glasses, having streamers around their necks and a hat on their antlers. Because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot.”

“You are guilty every time you use an alibi, saying you don't know how you want to live.”

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

“You cannot know where your people are going if you don't know where your people have been.”

“When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.”

“You should know me well enough by now to know I don't ask for things I don't think I can get.”

“Why won't anyone ever answer my questions?"
"Because you never stop asking them and especially because you keep asking them even when it's clear that nobody knows the answers."
"Well, how do I know that they don't know the answer unless I ask?”

“As I sometimes said to the important Jews, when I had them, something like: 'Well then, do you know where you are? You're with the Czar of the Jews. Don't you know that, didn't you see the Pariser Tageblatt?!”

“How often each day, if you were to verbalize your inner reality at that moment, would you have to say, “I don't want to be where I am?” What does it feel like when you don't want to be where you are–the traffic jam, your place of work, the airport lounge, the people you are with?”