As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him,, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.

I have a secret passion for mercy. . . but justice is what keeps happening to people.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.

There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

A graceful heart is a virtue of the meek.

Rap in its form is poetry, meaning the point of convergence is words.

Tradition is a fragile thing in a culture built entirely on the memories of the elders.

Personally, I hope he doesn't get out of the campaign. I need Rick Perry. I don't want to spend the next year trying to do jokes about Mitt Romney.

In the area of social righteousness we cannot be right on the inside and not do it. We cannot! Of course we have people who pretend that they can, but it simply isn't true.

I have trouble with letting go. That's my problem. Anybody that has extreme highs and extreme lows is bipolar to any psychologist and that's not necessarily the truth.

The real problem is arranging that experience in a way that tells a story, which is just incredible enough to be interesting, but credible enough to be believed.

I was thrown in the deep end at 18 when I got cast in a movie that I didn't audition for. The director just sort of found me and put me in a film, so the decision was really made for me.

When you move into a spiritual approach to life you begin to see yourself as connected to everyone and everything, and competition is replaced by something called cooperation.