All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.

The universe is so unique and perfect that it could not have originated by chance but was divined by flawless, creative design.

You cannot live in Los Angeles for any period of time without eventually trying to write a screenplay. It's like a flu bug that you catch ... Even the plumber has a screenplay in his truck.

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.

I have a metal plate in my head, and can pop my shoulder and pop it back.

Besides re-arming myself with joy, I need to know the holes in my defenses, the places where I'm vulnerable and where the enemy has successfully attacked me before.

If materialistic knowledge is power, it is not wisdom. It is but a blind force.

Photography today is so accurate and so good that it's really so much easier just to take photographs and work from them.

A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.

I feel close to [Kanye West]. We're friends, this is not just a working relationship.