Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

No empire lasts forever, no dynasty continues unbroken. Some day, you and I will be mere legends. All that matters is whether we did what we could with the life that was given to us.

I've got an uncle myself. Nobody should be held responsible for their uncles. Nature's little throwbacks - that's how I look at it.

Then you should have died! Died, rather than betray your friends, as we would have done for you!

Like any sport, if you can clinch it sooner, clinch it sooner. It just makes the celebration that much sweeter.

Winning to often is as disastrous as losing too often. Both get the same results, the falling off of the public's enthusiasm.

In English we say 'we are' but it's proper to say 'we are becoming' because things are becoming.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

Oh, if only I could be President and Congress, too, just for ten minutes.

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth...

Less pains in the world a man cannot take than to bold his tongue.