He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

One does no question miracles, or complain that they are no constructed perfectly to one's liking.

The more you resist change, the more it will be painful for you to accept it.

Be quick, but don't hurry.

We all come back to our little worlds.

Everything that I do has a certain mechanical logic to it, and follows my definition of design--which is function with cultural content.

Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

Wonder is defined by Thomas [Aquinas] in the Summa Theologiae [I-II, Q. 32, a. 8], as the desiderium sciendi, the desire for knowledge, active longing to know.

Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren't civil war, they are democracy at work, and that's beautiful.

What makes cookbooks interesting is to find out about the people and the culture that invented the food.