Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

Make your own luck, and then share it with others.

Taking a year off and going to school was the best thing I could have done after 'The Princess Diaries.' It taught me that I don't need Hollywood or a job to make me happy.

Gossiping is the plague of little towns.

I pray God I may never be brought to the melancholy trial, but if ever I should, it will be then known how far I can reduce to practice, principles, which I know to be founded in truth.

Summer — summer — summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil

The most beautiful words in the English language are 'not guilty'.

Flexibility is one of the main roads leading to happiness.

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.

and then woe is you, Pauly. Woe to the max.