But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.

It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.

their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be

But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw, " that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.

The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.

I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

Pain is meant to be temporary as long as you are not willing to give up on yourself. However, quitting never fails to make it last forever.

When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.

I happen to believe that the preemption school is correct, that the risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire his weapons will only grow with time.

Often I pretended to a cameraman to know less than I did. That way I got more cooperation.

The worst of all superstitions may be that astrology is a superstition.

We had to figure out how to produce books in a cost-effective way.

He who is persistent will realize God. So try your best to make meditation a regular experience in your life.

I have spoken with many former athletes, and they tell me the best time they had was in sports. I listen to them and use their experience in my career.

Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.