Do you think the occasional witch burning helps to weld society together?

When the world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos.

A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn't know it yet.

Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.

Loneliness was a full-body sensation, an anti-exhilaration, from his core outward.

Love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises.

That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else.

What was worse, being crazy or being evil?

Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other.

And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy.

Laurence felt a weird combination of shame and rage, as though he'd grown another new body part just in time to get punched in it.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Old formulas don’t give new solutions.

Do you need strength? Peace? Wisdom? Direction? Discipline? Ask for it! God will hear you.

I just ask that everyone continue to raise awareness and fight for pediatric cancer. The fight's not over.

There's nothing I like more than a writer who can sing, or a musician who has a book out.

When I got back from the war in 1946 people didn't want the Mr. Smith kind of movie any more, and I refused to make war pictures.

You are meant to have an amazing life.

Making the extra effort to say thanks in a genuine, personal manner goes a long way. It is pleasurable to do, and it encourages more of the same good behavior.

The bands that wrote the big, heroic rock songs - I really wanted to make a record like that.

Now that The Thorn and the Blossom has come out and I'm done with my doctoral degree (yes, I'm finally Dr. Goss), I'm turning to longer projects.