"Architecturally, the town looked like the worst of all possible cheap-and-sleazy tract developments, but the psychic texture it projected was even more depressing, more like that of one of those ghastly retirement communities, one of the innumerable Leisure Worlds or Sun Manors, those childless joyless retreats where colonies of that other kind of living dead collected to await the last trumpet."

"“Moas aren’t very bright,” Gracchus answers. “That’s one good reason why they became extinct.”"

"Beauty is a magnet: repels some, attracts many, leaves no one unmoved."

"May I be struck dead for saying this if I don’t mean it with all my heart: I wish the Lord and all his prophets would disappear and leave us alone. We’ve had enough religion for one season."

"Anything big and strange always upsets the people in power."

"As we zoomed along on the Chaos Express, I was sometimes tempted toward godliness the way the godly are tempted toward sin. But my love of divine reason left me no way to opt for the irrational."

"They could pray, they had the illusion that a divine plan governed this best of all possible worlds, while I was left in bleak, stormy limbo, dismally aware that the universe makes no sense and that the only universal truth there is is that Entropy Eventually Wins."

"I never became a believer. I had a natural predisposition toward skepticism. If you can’t measure it, it isn’t there. That included not only Old Whiskers and His Only Begotten Son, but all the other mystic baggage that people liked to carry around in those tense credulous years: the flying saucers, Zen Buddhism, the Atlantis cult, Hare Krishna, macrobiotics, telepathy and other species of extrasensory perception, theosophy, entropy-worship, astrology, and such. I was willing to accept neutrinos, quasars, the theory of continental drift, and the various species of quarks, because I respected the evidence for their existence; I couldn’t buy the other stuff, the irrational stuff, the assorted opiates of the masses, When the Moon is in the seventh house, etc., etc.—sorry, no."

"To devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste."

"I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?"

"It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our specialty."

"Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival."

"When you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don’t boast about it afterward to the victim!"

"His name would fade from the front pages in a few days; he knew too much about communications media to believe that his current notoriety would last."

"Dinoli had to clawed himself to first rank in public relations by sheer exertion, coupled with judicious backstabbing."

"I enjoyed the late 1960s as much as anyone, and I regarded much of the political ferment of the time as vital to the survival of our society—the Vietnam war might have gone on for many decades more without it. But the era did have its silly side, and the search for the immediately relevant at the expense of the less immediately practical side was, to me, one of the sillier aspects of it. Throwing most of past human knowledge overboard for the sake of bringing about instant social reform did not strike me as an effective way of achieving anything but ignorance. Evidently it seemed that way to others, too: after a while the traditional sciences and historical subjects returned to the curriculum, Shakespeare and Sophocles were allowed back in also, and not a great deal was heard from the earnest, deadly young decreers of non-negotiable demands who had had such power over academic life for a time. (Although a lot of them grew up and became university professors, and they are behind the modern craze for political correctness that has spread so much terror through our academic institutions.)"

"Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal."

"Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been."

"Flowers for $25.00, reluctant. Wining and dining for $150.00, catastrophic. Trying to get on first base, unattainable. For everything else there's Masturbate."

"Well, I'd like to leave you with a joke."

"Did you know it was a year ago today?"

"Sir, would you please come up here and kick the shit out of me?"

"Let me move over here. (Jay would then move barely a few inches to the left or right. He generally repeats this a few times per show)"

"It'll be over soon, miss."

"Am I bothering you, miss?"

"Thank you."

"Take my life, please."

"Does anybody know what I'm doing up here?"

"Did you know that today will never be tomorrow."

"At Motel 6 in Amish Country I wonder if they leave the light on for you?"

"I dated a partially nude model, and she did a half-assed job."

"People ask me what I think about euthanasia. I said I'm more concerned about the adults."

"I wanted to take up music, so my father bought me a blunt instrument. He told me to knock myself out."

"I was lonely driving here tonight so I hugged the road."

"I had a very lonely New Year's this year. I had to watch my own balls drop."

"I model irregular clothing."

"I slept with this girl, and in the morning I asked her if she wanted breakfast in bed. She said one pig in the blanket was enough."

"My boss told me to get my butt in gear. I told him I was shiftless."

"I saw a stationery store move."

"My girlfriend has crabs, I bought her fishnet stockings."

"I told my therapist I was having nightmares about nuclear explosions. He said don't worry, it's not the end of the world."

"I was going to buy a book on hair loss, but the pages kept falling out."

"My girlfriend bought me a down jacket, she said it fit my personality."

"I don't need to worry about identity theft because no one wants to be me."

"I went to an audition the other day, they were casting 13 people to be clouds. 14 people showed up, it was overcast."

"I saw a sign that said "Left Lane Closed." So I went someplace else."

"I went to the store and bought lady fingers. When I got home I noticed one of the fingers was missing so I went back to the store and the manager was nice enough to give me the finger."

"I went to a record store and asked for 50 Cent. They kicked me out for pan-handling."

"My whole family is lactose intolerant and when we take pictures we can't say cheese."