Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

The special calling of the artist is to call the world to a kind of rest or remind it of its restlessness

[Grief] is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.

Racism is ridiculous no matter where it's coming from.

The first step on the path to positive change is acknowledgement that change is necessary and possible. Open yourself to the possibility of seeing the world in a new way. What do you have to lose?

Love has to be reciprocated for it to be real.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So to make money in the summer we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.

Lie down and listen to the crabgrass grow.

Blogging is like work, but without coworkers thwarting you at every turn.

Every horse thinks its own pack heaviest.