If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?

Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.

What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.

In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.

The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: the true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.

I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.

I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can't unplug me.

A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.

I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks

That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question.

A blackbird doesn't change its tune to suit the times.

Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl - no superior alternative has yet been found.

Words have the greatest power to inflict everlasting pain. Words have the greatest power to heal the soul.

Fighting external monsters is easy in comparison to how we fight those within us.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

Prejudice doesn't make me mad. It just - I guess 'pisses me off' is the word.

But I also want to have a family with children one day, which is very important to me.

You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.