I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.

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.

Courage is like love, it must have hope for nourishment.

The final battle against intolerance is to be fought - not in the chambers of any legislature - but in the hearts of men.

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer

Furnish an example, stop preaching, stop shielding, don't prevent self-reliance and initiative, allow your children to develop along thier own lines.

Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.

People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity.

I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.

I treat every race the same. We all wanted to swim fast today and give something back to the crowd.

It's (Phil Niekro's knuckleball) like watching Mario Andretti park a car.

I love going back in time, and the only time you can really do that is on a movie set.