All this electromagnetic pollution in the air from the Internet and cell phones, it cuts you off from God.

Maybe [aliens] have been in our lives a lot longer than we want to admit. People have always seen strange things—elves and fairies—and now we don't. Now we see them, right?

If I can alter my perception of the reality, I can change the reality itself.

If you get enough people believing one thing, it's like reality bends itself to allow that to exist.

They were once fairies and elves. Now they are creatures from beyond the stars because you no longer believe in anything but humans.

The stars glittered through the atmosphere, and he thought of the distances that light must take to hit his eye at exactly that moment. Without him here, those photons would have been wasted.

Please do not say magic like you are discussing a bowel movement... Humanity expects the lights, so they are provided.

You have to surrender yourself to the experience.

Within you, within all human beings, is a seed of greatness that makes their kind quake with fear.

We're not mad, " he began, meaning he was. He was always a plural when mad, as though grammatically throwing his lot in with her mother gave him the power of her authority.

She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries.

Pain is inevitable. Misery is optional

It is a fundamental right for people to be allowed to love who they want to love and marry who they want to marry and stop holding on to some form of discrimination that it's just isn't fair.

What the world needs now is more Americans. The U.S. is the first nation on earth deliberately dedicated to letting people choose what they want and giving them a chance to get it.

Watching myself fight, I realize the line between success and failure is so narrow, it's scary.

My childhood in the Soviet Union was not terrible, it was very joyful.

Finley is going over to get a new piece of bat.

Go beyond tolerance to acceptance.

In the United States adherence to the values of the masculine mystique makes intimate, self-revealing, deep friendships between men unusual.

You are what you love, not who loves you... a person who loves has always won, no matter whether or not the love is fulfilled.

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.