Death is as casual and often as unexpected as birth. It is as difficult to define grief as joy. Each is finite. Each will fade.

Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.

Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.

Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Mulligan: invented by an Irishman who wanted to hit one more twenty yard grounder.

We must have been hunters and gatherers but some of us were just waiters and hopers.

I'm really much better at asking questions than answering them, since asking questions is like a constant deflection of oneself.

One spares old people just as one spares children.

Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.

You have to pay attention to the work on the page and make it as good as possible because it could be your last.

The true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children.

I'm having the same problems today that I had when I first started, saying that outrageous adult animation works.

A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once.

Work is my norm. I have mad energy, insane energy, a kind of stamina in terms of work that's a little crazy.

A best friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself