I'm happy. I don't ever have to pay anything, and I don't ever have to wash the dishes, and I don't ever have to behave nicely.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Vice is its own reward.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

Keegan had never realized how absolute silence could be in the minutes before dawn. Maybe because the expectation of battle filled the air, not even birds sang.

Underneath all notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious, and these are often not acknowledged.

Defense is superior to opulence.

The spoken word is nothing. It hardly lives longer than an insect! Only the written word is eternal. - Balbulus

How did he do it? He must be a genius!

In the end, the type of parent you are is going to be something that you carry with you. ... Having multiple kids, it's been a gift in a way. It's keeping the priorities straighter.

In our public life, California is on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country.

More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control.

My prophecy is but half his journey yet, For yonder walls, that pertly front your town, Yon towers, whose wanton tops do buss the clouds, Must kiss their own feet.

I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.