Despite his best efforts, maintaining dignity in a head attached to an unclean body wrapped in unclean garments was a battle that encouraged surrender.

Everybody dies. It’s no risk to lose your life. You knew it was lost from the beginning.

It remains for you to save one before saving others, to lead one before leading others.

Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans.

If all you do is think about what you need, you’re no better than an animal in the woods, and no smarter either. To be human, you’ve got to want. It makes you smarter and stronger.

Devotion to self is necessary. First, place the mask on yourself and breathe deeply. Then help the others. If you don’t save yourself, they will die.

Some people get what they want because they grab the power and swing it, and some people don’t.

Politics is all about dividing up the power. Washington D.C. likes to talk about spreading the wealth, but never spreading the power.

Being tough today might cause you to be weak in the future.

I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so.

Evil won’t leave you alone until you take a stand or until you’re dead.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Vir

Metrical geometry is thus a part of descriptive geometry, and descriptive geometry is all geometry.

Then when Gladys Knight came in to do my songs that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; / he is afraid.

There is nothing so mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one's sentiments.

I think any celebrity that adopts a child from a third world country is a fool.

I just look around and say, I'm a mess. I don't know why I do things.

Even when it comes to writing fiction, how do you encompass all this stuff that's right on the tip of your tongue? You have to fold that into what you're working on.

People flatter us because they can depend upon our credulity.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.