At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface.

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.

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

If there was a volcano under their feet, a Vesuvius that could erupt and bury this modern-day Pompeii at any moment, the best thing to do was dance on it.

If a pig could pray, it would pray for swill. What do you pray for?

The crowd sometimes plays a tremendous role to give you wings and carry you to victory.

The golf swing is among the most stressful and unnatural acts in sports, short of cheering for the Yankees.

The will to truth is merely the longing for a stable world.

I aim to write songs in a way that you don't have to have gone to Ghana to relate to it, you really just have to have a heart.

In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience.

The world ends when I die. And as far as I'm concerned, the rest of the universe might as well call it a day too.

Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears