But most good movies have a gun in 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.

In nature there are few sharp lines.

Invest in basic research and recruit the best minds.

My perfect reader doesn't just read - he or she devours books.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

Five years ago, I wasn't getting questions [about blogs and the internet] from the TV/radio critic of the New York Times.

In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.

I have never acted he has never been cast in a romantic lead or has been cast opposite a female love interest in any movie he starred in.

My mom was the picture of the blue-collar mom: Two and three and four jobs to make sure that me and my sister never needed, that was her thing

A thousand years of enjoying human glory is not worth even an hour spent sweetly communing with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

I thought marriage was tough. Golf's like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel! It's a psychological game that gets into your blood.