At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.

With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.

Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.

It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.

A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.

Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.

Mitt Romney - he had a Rock Hudson thing going, shoeblack hair and a well-hung resume, but even for a shameless, position-shifting phony he seemed a trifle insincere.

Be wary of strong drink, it can make you shoot at the tax collector...and miss.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is

Music is the soul food.

I never thought I'd say this, what Obama needs in his personality is a little George Bush.

Sometimes mistakes are the best thing that can happen, because they might lift you...out of your complacency, and open your mind up to a whole other area that you wouldn't have gone to intentionally.

I am inclined to think that one's education has been in vain if one fails to learn that most schoolmasters are idiots.

So, maybe you don't see blues so much in Styx's music but it is definitely part of Tommy's early music.

Simple rules guide innovative, intelligent responses. Comprehensive rules guide rote, routine responses.

Age has been the perfect fire extinguisher for flaming youth.

I don't know if many people know this about me, but I have multiple sclerosis. So I don't have time for a lot of shades of gray. I don't have time for BS.