Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

Clear out all of those doubts and fears. Let the past be the past. It's time.

You never get possessed forever.. However painful and devastating the state/period is, you will get back to normal someday..

Call it a clan call it a network call it a tribe call it a family: Whatever you call it whoever you are you need one.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave

Maybe it's true what Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.

I do a lot of stuff. I mean, you know, charity work.

You never know what a person is going through, regardless of how much money they make or however great a life you think they're living.