Must one have a heart of stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing? (In life, practically no one ever gets to kill the thing he hates… - Gore Vidal

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single... well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the things satirized; if they are not, the joke falls flat. Unfortunately for our native satirists, the American mass audience possess very little general information on any subject. Each individual knows his own immediate world, but as various research polls continually inform us, he holds little knowledge in common with others.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.