If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

Nothing important comes with instructions.

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.

When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

Don't waste your whole lifetime waiting for the perfect life when there's a perfectly good one within and right in front of you.

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

It requires philosophy and heroism to rise above the opinion of the wise men of all nations and races.

When I was a little boy I did not, of course, trouble much about my appearance.

I get interested in writers who are enigmatic.

Success isn't owned. It's leased and rent is due every day.

Some like them fat, some like them tall, some like them short, skinny legs and all. I like them all.

Don't judge anyone but don't trust anyone.

Throughout history, most of the wrongs of the world have resulted from people absolutely sure they were in the right.

You can't get away, you can't escape. You'll jump through a plate-glass window several times and end up being right back in the spider's web.