I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect thespeaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.

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.

Hope burns eternal in the human heart.

No one has ever held me so tightly. It's a shock to matter this much. It isn't like arms are around me, it's more like a house, as if he has made a house around me. As he did around Tommy.

In this place called Hell novels are written by people who don't read books.

Prayer moves the hand that moves the world.

I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.

I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.

There needs a long time to know the worlds pulse.

I have always had this necessity to win. When I played with my friends on the street, football or running, I always wanted to be the best.

In this chaotic world where everything is moving and turning, one's partner should be like the centre of a wheel which never moves and always remains still.