Hasn't there always been a moon?""Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue...

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

Do not starve your soul while you indulge your body. That is dressing the shadow.

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

Learning is a process of mutual discovery for teacher and pupil. Keep an open mind to their unexpected responses.

You just have to take control of your own performance.

In a man's middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.

Who cares how we avoided a war and got a dictator to give up his chemical weapons if we avoided a war and got a dictator to give up his chemical weapons.

You do not question an author who appears on the title page as "T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.C.Path. (Lond.), F.F.Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G.

The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.

There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.