I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

One of the most beautiful things to do is to paint darkness, which nevertheless has light in it.

What a wonderful world it could be, when spiritual factions would choose to read sacred writings as colorful metaphors and not as bloody declarations of war. (“Is heaven a place in the sky?”)

I've thought hard about my psychological connections and I think I've managed to separate out the psychological from the legal, moral, and political.

I can see you in the kitchen bending over a hot stove, and I can't see the stove

When someone's an actor and you're an actor, you meet them and you feel like you know them. We're in the same business, and we all speak the same comedy language.

Don’t join an easy crowd; you won’t grow. Go where the expectations and the demands to perform are high.

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.

I am a Jew. Those are four words of pride. My Jewishness is as deep as my genes.

"Difficulty" is the name of an ancient tool that was created purely to help us define who we are.

Seek above all for a game worth playing. Play as if your life and sanity depend on it, because they do!