A suburb is an attempt to get out of reach of the city without having the city be out of reach.

Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.

When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows.

My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet.

Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path.

Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

Before the seventeenth century, a child passed directly into the adult world between the ages of five and seven . . . then came the industrial revolution . . .so the child-centered home was born.

Human beings are consistent with regard to codes of honor, but endlessly fickle with regard to whom those codes apply. E.N. Wilson

To live with unforgiveness is to become a captive cultured citizen whose taxation is that of demonically ticketed torment.

I come from a part of New York that was almost entirely immigrants. I was born in America, but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe.

It is the unspoken ethic of all magicians to not reveal the secrets.

Nickel for my thoughts, dimes in my bed. Quarters of the kush shape the lines in my head.

I was walking down the street, and I found a man's hand in my pocket. I asked, "What do you want?" "A match" "Why didn't you ask me?" "I don't talk to strangers."

I've always been ambitious since I was nine years old and that was never going to change.

But nothing really clicked for me until I gave up completely on hitting the overlap and just did what I loved, even when I thought nobody else in the world would be interested.

We need to focus on radical Islamic terrorists and we need to stop them before they carry out acts of terror.