I was at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver for four years, and I loved it.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.

Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

When we constantly ask for miracles, we're unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon.

[The writer] can easily foresee his fate ... in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during an afternoon nap ....

Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well.

A man's wisdom is measured by his hope.

The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.

I want an explosion the size of Cleveland.

Abligurition: an actual, if very obscure, English word, which means the spending of too much money on food.

Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on.

Give me a scotch, I'm starving.

To Islamize doesn't make sense to me. But to center, but to have intellectual empathy and modesty - all these dimensions are important on how we look at truth.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.