I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.

Belief is made up of the same non-substance of which we ourselves are composed. The test of any belief system, then, is the degree to which this same light is permitted to shine through.

Don't worry about it. The right thing will come at the right time.

The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it.

A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.

Great personal style is an extreme curiosity about yourself.

Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!

My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, "Whose little boy are you?"

Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.