Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.

For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.

No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

Well, Ben says you have to be married to get a girl pregnant. And me and Cindy are not married, so she couldn't get pregnant, see?

People have moments of consciousness and epiphanies throughout their lives, but then suppress the realization.

Very high altitude observatories are a known worker health hazard.

The opening notes of a song began, some plucking of guitar strings. I knew the melody. It was Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved.” As pop songs went, it was pretty damn good, a bit of a favorite of mine.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

Nothing is more diminishing than trying to control success or hold on to things.

It's not about how you are when things go well, what defines you is how you are when you fail from an obstacle.

Every company has a rocky beginning.

Now we have food networks and everything. CNN was the beginning of all of that.

Data is not intelligence.