The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'

The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'

A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.

I do some eccentric dancing.

I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.

I heard on public radio recently, there's a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people. It's in Vermont. I don't think I'd be very good at Weed Dating.

I just think lots of words have physicality. How about the word 'wobble?' You think that's arbitrary? When you say the word 'wince,' you wince. How about that?

I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity.

I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.

People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves.

Think about scary movies: There's a fine line between horror and humor.

To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don't remember what I was like before I learned my ABC's, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.

When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don't weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly.

When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.

A good heavy book holds you down. Its an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

Plan Colombia was supposed to reduce Colombia's cultivation and distribution of drugs by 50 percent, but 6 years and $4.7 billion later, the drug control results are meager at best.

While I recognize the great value and importance of prescription drugs and strongly support a continued U.S. focus on pharmaceutical research and development, our nation's seniors cannot be asked to subsidize the drug costs of other wealthy industrialized nations any longer.

I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.

I was 48-years old before anybody talked me into it for medicinal purposes, instead of some of these drugs that they give you that will lead you to heart surgery and things of that nature.

I was a gang leader. Although, it was a gang for defensive purposes. It was not a gang to sell drugs.

Drugs will get you out of your own way, but we lived it, and that's dangerous. It can actually turn around on itself and steal your soul, and that's what happened.

Previously people were treated anonymously particular on a drugs situation which is obviously highly emotive. They have been treated anonymously even after the verdict had been reached.

Drugs are a bet with your mind.

A lot of victims, for example, have become addicted to alcohol and drugs. It seems to me that the church's healing ministry is going to be enhanced through this in much broader strokes. That's good, it's all positive.

Sex and drugs were simply not discussed in our culture at that time.

It was 1967, and the hippie thing was happening. I got into experimenting with drugs while I was in college in Michigan.

And because of these programs like Medicare, Medicare prescription drugs, Social Security, we now have the healthiest and wealthiest group of senior citizens that the world has ever seen. This is a continuing commitment to that.

If you have children, you don't want to have drugs and drinks in the house. It's just not good.

Well, I'm kinda like George Carlin. I think that there ought to be a time where everybody should have all the drugs they want and there'd be nobody in charge, sort of like... now!

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll.

Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.

It wouldn't sit easily on one's conscience that you had been warned and there could be danger, but nevertheless you went ahead and said let's dispense these drugs.

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.

So at the end of the day, our number 1 goal, our top priority, is to motivate American youngsters to reject the abuse of illegal drugs, tobacco and alcohol. All three of them are illegal behaviors.

Many kids can tell you about drugs but do not know what celery or courgettes taste like.

As far as critics, I'm not a hip guy. I was never on drugs. Nobody ever felt sorry for me 'cause I went straight or found God. I always had God. I've always like, played by the rules.

I thought the '60s was the most exciting time and the most vital music, and we were really together as one mind then. Then afterwards, the songs and the bad drugs, that took its toll.