A lot of lip service gets paid to being honest, but no one really wants to hear it unless what's being said is the party line.

I think Helen of Troy must have been pretty hot. She got two countries going crazy for 10 years over her.

You can’t make everybody laugh. You gotta just do what you think is funny. Just be obstreperous to everybody.

I know nowadays the common wisdom is to celebrate diversity as long as you don't point out that people are different.

I'm just another guy who thinks he's smarter than he is, in a long line of them.

The ancient Greeks were the first ones to say an unexamined life is not worth living. They don't tell you of course what we found out, an examined life not that fascinating either.

The earth is a used Kleenex on the universe's nightstand.

Twitter is one of those dangerous toys that if it gets in the hands of the wrong person you'll have the mind of a 12-year-old masquerading as an adult.

So instead of talking about theoretical ways of ending the war and violence, I say that we have to get rid of the individual asholes in each office and situation.

People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven't changed since time began. We're still the same.

I get the impression the English kings were witty, for some reason. I feel like all you had was your wit.

Every life has one true love snapshot.

You deal with mythological stuff for a few years, you learn that paradises are usually places where you get killed.

When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge

It is a horrible, terrible thing, the worst thing, to watch somebody you love die right in front of you and not be able to do nothing about it.

I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.

Why couldn't Obama have picked somebody respectable as his running mate, you know, like John Kerry did?

We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge.

I chose to be in this job and things don't always go your way. But I'll keep going. As a manager you have to be optimistic and think things are going to get better.

I'm personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.