I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry-which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.

Here's me opening my wrists before breakfast, Christmas day, and here's you asking if it hurt. Here's where I choose between mea culpa and Why the hell should I tell you?

Gradually I became aware that professing English because I loved poems was like practicing vivisection because I loved dogs.

The scariest thing about death is not dying, it's the uncertainty of what happens after

The way to achieve happiness is to have a high standard for yourself and a medium one for everyone else.

They say that people teach what they need to learn. By adopting the role of happiness teacher, if only for myself, I was trying to find the method to conquer my particular faults and limitations.

There is a wealth of unexpressed love in the world.

Nobody really knows who I am, where I came from, what's in my heart, why I believe in the things I believe, what I see behind the scenes and they don't see.

Are we not also married to conscience which we would love to get rid of often enough since it is more bothersome than a man or a woman ever could become?

Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don't think so.

I don't fight the suburban areas or collar counties. I get along with them; they're former Chicagoans anyway.

Care not for time and success. Act out thy part, whether it be to fail or to prosper.

Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.