Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.

People like nonfiction presented to them in a certain way, so that they don't have to think about whether it's true or not. They like it to have that imprimatur of respectability, of genuineness.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

I'm so sorry about all you're going through, but I'm not sorry that it brought you to me.

Admire all the stars, but what you really must admire is your very own Sun, the cosmic candle of our beloved Earth!

The temple of art is built in words.

Does it hurt?" The childish question had escaped Harry's lips before he could stop it. "Dying? Not at all," said Sirius. "Quicker and easier than falling asleep.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

No one should be adored, it's fundamentally immoral.

Gender data is important. If girls don’t have a birth certificate, how do we know how many are marrying as children?

There ought t'be some way t'eat celery so it wouldn't sound like you wuz steppin' on a basket.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

My mother had to explain that one couldnt compose a Liszt rhapsody because it was a piece of music that Liszt himself had composed.