A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.

At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.

With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.

Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.

It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.

Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.

Mitt Romney - he had a Rock Hudson thing going, shoeblack hair and a well-hung resume, but even for a shameless, position-shifting phony he seemed a trifle insincere.

Either we're a team or we aren't. Either you trust me or you don't.

You’d be hard-pressed to find an old person who would trade in a true friend for any amount of popularity or fame. You'd also be hard-pressed to find a young person who wouldn't.

Life will never be perfect, so we must learn how to make the imperfections work for us.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow.

No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.

I woke up early this mornin' with a new state of mind/ A creative way to rhyme without usin' knives and guns

The best live among us in disguise.

Ugly is attractive. Ugly is exciting.

As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.

You go from these high hopes when you're writing to just a desperate want of not making a complete fool of yourself by the end of it.