I needed to temper (my dad's) enthusiasm a bit (about attending Princeton), and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide...My mom was actually jealous.

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.

Here's to us, who's like us Damn few, and they're all dead.

Now I know why tigers eat their young.

I'd be doing Oscar predictions months ahead of time, and not only for the Oscars, for the Grammys. This is just what excited me as a kid.

Yeah, it's more like playing what you think is appropriate for the moment, not forcing any particular style.

Mythology is often defined as 'other peoples' religions', religion can be thought of as misinterpreted mythology.

You have to learn to accept your body. You have to learn to like what you see in the mirror. There are definitely times when I don't feel like myself, but you have to fake it until you make it.

HIV is no respecter of persons. Any of us could find ourselves with the disease, and then what? We tend to stigmatize as a way to deceive ourselves about our invincibility. But it is a delusion.

The central premise of this book is that the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed.

The Castro government is disproportionately white given the color of the island. It doesn't look like Cuba.

The easier you can make it inside your head, the easier it will make things outside your head.